Things Done

[bunn]

1) Mowed the tiny front lawnlets
(??? in February ???  It was so hot today!) 
    Search and destroy mission on brambles lurking darkly around the beech hedge moderately successful
    Laid loads of hazel hedge.  Too hot to wear a jumper!
    Primroses, daffodils and azaleas in bloom. Snowdrops already finishing in sunnier spots. 


2) Went for a walk from Bere Ferrers down to the Tamar with my mother and her dogs.   Very muddy fields, tiny baby calves, falling sun reflecting across the river.   Saw an egret. 

3) Tried to paint another Derbyshire landscape for Eagle BB.  
Didn't go well even though I haven't even tried to put a Marcus in the foreground yet. :-(  Need to decide whether to give up and try again or plug on & hope it will come together.   Am inclined to think that paintings where you get that 'Uuurgh I hate this' feeling rarely turn out really well in the end. 


4) Sent in enquiry about a couple of lurchers, hoping that one of them may be suitable for me to adopt.  

5) Bills. Car service, car insurance, vet bills, arrrg.  :-(  

6) Watched Top Gear about the end of the Saab car manufacturer.  
Made me feel cheerful about owning Helga Saab. Apparently only awesome people own Saabs?  (in honesty I must admit this seems an unlikely proposition...)  Good to hear that people are still making the parts, that 's a relief.   Helga is 10 and well over 120,000 miles but seems quite happy to keep on going so far.  Good girl Helga! 


7) Watched Being Human. Just a bit too depressing. May give up watching.  Annie is so bloody naive suddenly, and it's just a bit irritating. Surely she wasn't quite this thick always?  And the casual killing without any real regret to it is a bit icky, it now seems that from being aspirational, ordinary humanity is just unimportant collateral damage. 

8) Finished reading Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber, mother of Ursula Le Guin.  
About a North American Indian man who turned up in California in 1911, having lived his whole life in hiding until finally being found starving, as the last survivor of a series of atrocities that wiped out his tribe (the Yahi, a subgroup of the Yana).  He was taken to a museum where he lived until he died a few years later of TB.  Tragically sad, and full of questions such as:
        a) what did he really think of the white people who 'befriended' him and took him to a museum to demonstrate his 'native skills' to an audience of over 1000 people a day (he never told them his real name...) 
        b) was he really 'the last'?  What happened to the women of his tribe who were 'given to a rancher' !!!???
        c) what gives with Batwi, the 'halfbreed' who translated for Ishi to begin with when nobody else could speak his language?  Why is he described with such contempt (NB by 'halfbreed' the writer means he was half Yana, half Maidu Indian - the next-door tribe!) 
         d) what on earth can one think of people who accidentally find a 'hidden village' and promptly steal the inhabitants' subsistence-level tools and supplies, leaving them unable to survive, *as souvenirs*
        e) is it correct to call someone who crafted arrowheads from discarded glass bottles stolen from rubbish heaps, roofed his house with wagon canvas and screwed it all together with scavenged metal screws 'Stone Age'?  And if not, how do you describe that?

On the whole, left me feeling incredibly lucky in my lot in life.  The history of the USA : SO GRIM. 

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It is a very sad book, though as one might expect, beautifully written and very readable. Some of the writer's attitudes and phraseology are a little painful from a modern viewpoint, but I suspect in 1960 it was probably a very enlightened work.

I read this book primarily for that reason: with Tolkien, his writing is of course very much flavoured by his work and studies, and having re-read a couple of versions of 'Beowulf' recently, the idea came to me that would be appropriate to do some reading around Le Guin as well, particularly as her writing draws on sources that I'm much less (or not at all) familiar with.

[skordh.livejournal.com]

A lot of Le Guin is about people a long way from their home cultures. I was struck by a description of the way a child reacts to the traveller Shevek in "The Disposessed" (Shevek also lives in two worlds):

He represented something to the child which Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile.

Is this something from Le Guin's own childhood perhaps, and memories of people like Ishi?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

She would not have known Ishi personally - he died in 1916, five years after coming out of hiding - no resistance to 20th century disease carried by the myriad museum visitors, it just gets more woeful - but there might still be echoes there. Her father Alfred Kroeber was a very eminent anthropologist who apparently testified for the California Indians in a case against the USA, she'd have been old enough to remember that.