Scottish

Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place

caitlin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I felt deeply uncomfortable while reading Clare Cooper Marcus’ Iona Dreaming. Too uncomfortable, I thought—like eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation with a long-lost friend.

Clare Cooper Marcus writes about a six-month, mostly solitary retreat spent on the small Scottish island of Iona. Twice a survivor of cancer, semi-retired academic professor, avid gardener, single mother of two, and author of several books, Marcus removes herself to Iona to focus on healing. In this book, she reflects on that experience and connects it to her wartime childhood spent in the English countryside, her experiences as a young wife and mother, and her cancer diagnoses and treatments. Throughout, Marcus crafts little vignettes and narratives from her adventures on the island, taking us through her brief stint as a waitress in a hotel café, long walks around the entire island, a run-in with bird-watchers, laundry day, and an encounter with the fairies.

If my brief description of the scope of Iona Dreaming leads you to believe it is incoherent, then the fault is my own, not Marcus’ prose. Even though the content of the book spans nearly her entire lifetime, Marcus’ writing conveys quiet and solitude. While reading, I often had the strange feeling that I was inhabiting Marcus’ innermost thoughts.

The intimacy of Marcus’ writing made me very uncomfortable when I first began the book, but by the time I finished it, I was grateful for it. First, I was delighted by the way she writes the island of Iona. Marcus’ academic work focuses on sense of place, and she writes about particular places with sensitivity and conviction. Second, Marcus writes herself with as much openness and sensitivity as she writes about Iona. I thought this an incredible connection and analogy: to think of oneself as a location or as a place.

While reading Iona Dreaming, it occurred to me that it could be very enlightening to consider how one conceives relationships to the external world in light of how one considers relationships to oneself: is the world (or oneself) an undisciplined thing to be mastered, or a natural thing to be appreciated? Feminists have written about the self and feminists have written about nature, but feminist work on place and on self with place could be quite fruitful. Though Marcus doesn’t say much about her relationship to feminism or to feminist thought, her lovely memoir may certainly provoke important feminist work in that area.

Written by: kristina grob, October 21st 2010

Quiet Little Voices single

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:29:00 +0000

By We Were Promised Jetpacks

Fat Cat Records

Hyped-up Scottish indie rockers We Were Promised Jetpacks have been around since 2003, but are only now releasing their debut album, These Four Walls (out June 15 in the UK and July 9 in the U.S.). They opened for fellow Scots Frightened Rabbit in 2008, and that connection led them to their deal with Fat Cat Records.

The single “Quiet Little Voices” opens with a restless guitar line that is soon joined by a pulsing bass line, frenetic cymbals, and Adam Thompson’s powerful, lightly accented vocals (his brogue is much stronger on some of the band’s other material). Despite being over four minutes long, the song doesn’t have much substance; if you know the title, you know the majority of the lyrics, as each line of the first (and only) verse starts with those three words, and the refrain consists of the same words backed by a rousing chorus of whoa-oh’s. When it sounds like the second verse should come in, a brief return to the intro instead leads into a second round of the chorus, and then a third. It’s lazy songwriting that manages to get by on charm and stadium-ready glory; it’s not hard to imagine a room full of people grabbing their friends and singing along with fervor, even though the lyrics are so repetitive and don’t really mean anything.

With its memorable hook and anthemic quality, it’s easy to understand why “Quiet Little Voices” was chosen as a single. However, it’s not nearly as strong as the other tracks from These Four Walls that were made available online in advance of the album’s release, which are less formulaic and boast copious amounts of Scottish charm.

Written by: Kiri Oliver, August 20th 2009

The Good Fairies of New York

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:29:00 +0000

By Martin Millar

Soft Skull Press

Having recently moved to New York City, one of my first excursions was to the Strand Bookstore. Late one evening in May, I walked into the shop and, feeling slightly overwhelmed but giddy with excitement, I ventured into the maze of tables and shelves surfeit with books.

Within ten minutes, I happened upon a book entitled The Good Fairies of New York. The title caught my attention: fairies? New York? The titular connotations suggested that the book would be a type of urban fantasy. Seeing that Neil Gaiman, a master of sci-fi and fantasy literature, wrote the introduction (an obvious sign of endorsement: “I owned it for more than five years before reading it, then lent my copy to someone I thought should read it, and never got it back. Do not make either of my mistakes.”), I immediately decided to purchase the book and began to read it as soon as I hopped onto the train.

The book’s opening scene encapsulates the fittingness of the generic prescription of the book as “urban fantasy”: two drunken fairies stumble into a fourth floor window and vomit all over the apartment floor of its owner, Dinnie, who is described as “an overweight enemy of humanity.”

The narrative of The Good Fairies consists of a handful of interwoven plots, such that the events of one plot have an effect, direct or less than direct, on another. There are two prominent storylines among the abundance. The first is that of the two Scottish fairies, Morag and Heather, and their quest to find a way home to Scotland, after mistakenly arriving in Manhattan and, as time passes, becoming engrossed in the various lives and events that occur throughout the city—from fairy wars in Central Park and Harlem to helping the ghost of The New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunder recover his lost guitar.

The second pertains to one of Heather and Morag’s adventures in New York and with New Yorkers, in which they determine to assist Dinnie in becoming a respectable violinist, and, more important, a respectable human capable of winning the heart of the book’s female (human) protagonist, Kerry. Kerry suffers from Crohn’s Disease and spends her time trekking through the city in her quest to unearth rare flowers for her flower alphabet project. Dinnie’s aforementioned distaste of humanity and his corresponding misanthropy sit in contradistinction to Kerry’s love of humanity and her abundant exuberance for life—a positive effect of her disease. Clearly, it is not quite love at first sight for the two, but the fairies vow to make the match.

Millar is wonderfully successful in capturing the mad buzz, the electric energy, the vibrancy and vitalistic life of New York City. Like many fantasy novels, the eccentric characters make the novel memorable. But, unlike a majority of texts in this genre, this particular one refuses to follow any particular, trite, story-arc oft associated with the fantasy (as a type of romance) genre. Instead, what The Good Fairies follows is the pulse of New York City and the beatings of the characters’ hearts, filled with punk rock beats and melodies.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, July 30th 2009