selkrok

A simple selkrok or selbåge with the wooden pads in place

[Image source: https://vlh.kulturhotell.se/items/show/201579 .]


Today's obscure Swedish word. In the novel I'm currently absorbed in, Bo R. Holmberg's Dagsmeja (1989), which is set in the early 1960s in northern Sweden, there is this sentence about Edvin's father, a dealer in scrap.

På vintern samlade han, sålde och köpte batterier, bildelar, selkrokar, pumpar, fälgar och däck. (p. 18)

Which I translated:

In the winter he built up his stock, bought and sold batteries, car parts, harness fittings, pumps, wheel-rims and tyres.

A selkrok (literally "harness crook") is really something more specific than a "harness fitting", but there's no English word for it.

Also known as a selbåge (literally ”harness bow”), it was an old-fashioned part of the harness of a working horse in Nordic countries. It was an arch-shaped piece of wood or metal that rested on wooden pads on the horse’s withers; its function was to keep the reins high above the traces and to keep the harness straps aligned. It did not bear any part of the load strain, which was taken by the collar; it was basically a kind of harness saddle (not the kind you sit on). The older wooden selkrokar were often beautifully carved and decorated, and are now found in folk-museums. I imagine Edvin's dad was picking up the plain metal ones. They were used in the 1920s (see the photo below), but perhaps by the 1960s they were becoming farmyard clutter?

A selkrok in use by Lapland forest workers in the 1920s.

[Image source: https://www.storumansfotoarkiv.se/items/show/2392 . A photo from the 1920s, taken at Gunnarn in Storuman, Västerbotten (Lapland). ]

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021028291451/selkrok . Wooden selkrok, carved and painted, from 1776. In the county museum at Gävleborg.]

More information:

About harness types and terminology (in Swedish):
https://korning.ifokus.se/articles/4daea25688f47226c5000e3a-olika-typer-av-selar

About harness fittings, including selkrokar, that became folk-art objects (post by Robert Pohjanen, in Swedish, on the Norbotten museum blog):
https://kulturmiljonorrbotten.com/2016/10/07/bogtran-och-selbagar/

Too quick despairer

Spiny Restharrow. Swindon, 21 June 2020.

So, some tempestuous morn in early June,
   When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
      Before the roses and the longest day --
   When garden-walks and all the grassy floor
      With blossoms red and white of fallen May
         And chestnut-flowers are strewn --
   So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
      From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
      Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze :
   The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I !

Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go ?
   Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
      Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
   Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
      Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
         And stocks in fragrant blow ;
   Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
      And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
      And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
   And the full moon, and the white evening-star.


(Matthew Arnold, from "Thyrsis", written in 1865)

Scarlet Tiger on Wisteria. Frome, 14 June 2020.

Dryden's Prologues

[Image source: Wikipedia . The Duke's Theatre in Dorset Gardens (Whitefriars) was the new river-front theatre built in 1671 for the Duke's Company, for whom Dryden wrote. The "Duke" was Charles II's brother, the Duke of York, who became James II in 1685. (The site had been cleared of other buildings by the 1666 fire. It lay beside Dorset Stairs, which allowed members of the audience to arrive by boat, so they didn't have to pass through the shady district of Alsatia.) This 19th-century engraving is based on a drawing made shortly before the building was demolished in 1709. Both John Dryden and Aphra Behn (another Duke's Company author) lived close by.]


I've been reading my way through the 60 double-column pages of Prologues and Epilogues in my copy of the collected poems of John Dryden. I think they're a pretty good way of diving more deeply into his work. These poems are often funny, often salacious, unbuttoned, not too demanding, and of course fairly short. They're all in heroic couplets, the form Dryden made his own. They tell us a lot about Restoration theatre, culture and politics, and they tell us a bit about Dryden, too.

The idea of these prologues, formally, is to commend the play to the audience. But of course no prologue or epilogue can really save a play. So, more often than not, these poems tend to mix compliment with satire; to switch between abject grovelling and outrageous swagger; to cheerfully insult the gentlemen, the ladies, the court, the city, the country, the critics, the play, the actors and the author. Some of the hits are harmless and some of them sting (or sound as if they do); but it's all part of the act.

And after all our judging Fops were serv'd,
Dull Poets too should have a Dose reserv'd,
Such Reprobates as, past all Sence of Shaming,
Write on, and nere are satisfy'd with Damming,
Next, those, to whom the Stage does not belong,
Such whose Vocation only is to Song,
At most to Prologue ; when for Want of Time
Poets take in for Journeywork in Rhime. (1)

Dryden himself evidently "took in" for plenty of "Journeywork": he wrote prologues not only for his own plays, but for many others too. I wonder if it was really a matter of income or, more likely, that kind of mutual burnishing of reputation that still occurs when, for example, a supposedly eminent writer is invited to introduce a supposedly promising newcomer; the basic mechanism of any literary establishment.

Gallants, a bashful Poet bids me say
He's come to lose his Maidenhead to-day.
Be not too fierce, for he's but green of Age,
And ne're till now debauch'd upon the Stage.
He wants the suff'ring part of Resolution,
And comes with blushes to his Execution.
E're you deflow'r his Muse, he hopes the Pit
Will make some Settlement upon his Wit.
Promise him well, before the Play begin ;
For he wou'd fain be cozen'd into Sin. (2)

The poems diverge into sex talk on the faintest of pretexts. Deflowering, cuckoldry, prostitution, the pox, rape, masturbation (both male and female), impotence, the young and incompetent, the old and fumbling, prudes and hypocrites, insatiable wives and serially roving husbands, experimentation and playing with gender roles; it's all here.

Yes, there's a lot of masculine sniggering going on, but it isn't just smut. Here for the first time were theatrical occasions where women were on the stage as well as in the audience. Often, these prologues/epilogues were designed to be given by women actors. Dryden was helping to build a social consensus around tolerance and honesty between the sexes; admittedly within a rather narrow sphere of the upper classes. But this achievement of his age was a great one; that tradition of honesty, or at least the aspiration to honesty, survived Victorian repression and still underlies the social interrogations of today, especially in feminism and queer studies.

Another constant resource of these poems is nationalism. Usually that means attacking the character of other nations, though naturally the poems often aim a back-handed swipe at the English.

But ev'n your Follies and Debauches change
With such a Whirl, the Poets of your Age
Are tyr'd, and cannot score 'em on the Stage,
Unless each Vice in short-hand they indite,
Ev'n as notcht Prentices whole Sermons write.
The heavy Hollanders no Vices know,
But what they us'd a hundred years ago ;
Like honest Plants, where they were stuck, they grow ;
They cheat, but still from cheating Sires they come ;
They drink, but they were christen'd first in Mum.
Their patrimonial Sloth the Spaniards keep,
And Philip first taught Philip how to sleep.
The French and we still change ; but here's the Curse,
They change for better, and we change for worse ;
They take up our old trade of Conquering,
And we are taking theirs, to dance and sing ; ... (3)

The Scots are mocked for their poverty:

Lac'd Linen there would be a dangerous Thing ;
It might perhaps a new Rebellion bring ;
The Scot who wore it wou'd be chosen King. (4)

Of the Irish, he tastefully remarks:

You have beheld such barbarous Macs appear
As merited a second Massacre ;
Such as like Cain were branded with Disgrace,
And had their Country stampt upon their Face. (4)

The "first" massacre that Dryden had in mind was not, as we might imagine, the English massacres of Catholics under Cromwell and others, but the 1641 rebels' massacre of Protestant Ulster settlers (which had received far more publicity in England).

Perhaps it's as well to point out that this seemingly ferocious assault is occasioned by nothing more than Dryden's company appearing at "the Act" [the annual festivities at the end of the Oxford academic year, subsequently replaced by the Encaenia], which a year or two earlier had seen some performances by a Dublin troupe, invited by the Duke of Ormonde.

Dryden's rabble-rousing against the Dutch was more seriously intended:

The doteage of some Englishmen is such,
To fawn on those who ruine them, the Dutch.
They shall have all rather than make a War
With those who of the same Religion are.
The Streights, the Guiney Trade, the Herrings too,
Nay, to keep friendship, they shall pickle you.
Some are resolv'd not to find out the Cheat,
But Cuckold-like, love him who does the Feat :
What injuries soe'r upon us fall,
Yet still the same Religion answers all :
Religion wheedled you to Civil War,
Drew English Blood, and Dutchmens now wou'd spare. (5)

This was in 1673. There was indeed a third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74), which the English lost. One consequence was that Mary, the Duke's eldest daughter, married William of Orange (in 1677). Dryden had to be a bit more circumspect about the Dutch after that.

The "Streights" was the Straits of Gibraltar, contested between the Dutch and English, both of whom wanted to pass through it to trade with Smyrna.

The "Guiney Trade" was the trade along the west coast of Africa, which supplied slaves for the West Indies and gold for Europe. The Dutch and English were fighting for control of that, too.

Most galling was the substantial wealth the Dutch gained from their herring trade after discovering how to preserve the fish. Their main fishing grounds were just off the east coast of England in what we call the North Sea but Dryden had called "the British Ocean". The English tried to set up their own herring industry, but never made a great success of it.

But did Dryden himself realize that these commercial interests were really just pretexts, and that the destruction of the Dutch Republic was one of the intended outcomes of the 1670 Treaty of Dover between Charles II and Louis XIV? Probably not; it was a closely guarded secret. Anyway, Dryden's loyalty to his royal masters required some impressive demonstrations of how to tack with the wind. As time went by, both they and he became more embattled, and I could sense it, reading through the poems chronologically. Not that the poems wish to spell it out: for instance, you could easily read the Prologue to the Duchess on her Return from Scotland (1682) without gaining any sense of the violent controversy that still raged around James' marriage to the charming Mary of Modena.

But for all that can be said against him, there is a kind of honesty in Dryden. He isn't a confessional poet, but in the unbuttoned intimacy of the prologue form he doesn't mind letting us see his feelings. As things increasingly went against his party we hear something different from the splenetic fireworks, something more like moroseness, fury (in the attacks on Whigs in the 1680s), anxiety, resignation ...


*

Here's a complete prologue, one I particularly like for its fertile combination of imagery as well as its incidental literary interest.

PROLOGUE TO CIRCE.
Were you but half so wise as you're severe,
Our youthfull Poet shou'd not need to fear ;
To his green years your Censures you would suit,
Not blast the Blossom, but expect the Fruit.
The Sex that best does pleasure understand
Will always chuse to err on t'other hand.
They check not him that's aukard in delight,
But clap the young Rogues Cheek, and set him right.
Thus heartn'd well, and flesh't upon his Prey,
The youth may prove a man another day.
Your Ben and Fletcher, in their first young flight,
Did no Volpone, no Arbaces write ;
But hopp'd about, and short Excursions made
From Bough to Bough, as if they were afraid,
And each were guilty of some Slighted Maid.
Shakespear's own Muse her Pericles first bore ;
The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moore.
'Tis miracle to see a first good Play ;
All Hawthorns do not bloom on Christmas-day.
A slender Poet must have time to grow,
And spread and burnish as his Brothers do.
Who still looks lean, sure with some pox is curst,
But no Man can be Falstaff-fat at first.
Then damn not, but indulge his stew'd Essays,
Encourage him, and bloat him up with Praise,
That he may get more bulk before he dies.
He's not yet fed enough for Sacrifice.
Perhaps, if now your Grace you will not grudge,
He may grow up to write, and you to judge. (6)

Volpone : 1605-06, well into Jonson's career as a dramatist.

Arbaces : The lead character in A King and No King, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1611), from the peak period of their collaboration.

Slighted Maid : A play by Sir Robert Stapylton, from 1663. Dryden didn't think much of it.

Pericles : Dryden was mistaken about the sequence, but it's understandable. The naïve-looking Pericles is actually one of Shakespeare's later plays (1607-08), but it survives only in a ruined text, and most scholars now think that the first three acts are by George Wilkins. Interesting testament to the already high reputation of Othello (1602-03?), here representing Shakespeare's mature achievement.

stew'd : a nice image, but an inadvertent one. Scholars are agreed that the word must be an error: suggested emendations include "rude" and "sterv'd".

Hawthorns : Normally flowered in May (with global warming, it's now April).  The "Glastonbury Thorn", var. 'Biflora', also puts out flowers at Christmas.

burnish : "Of the human frame: to grow plump, or stout, to spread out; to increase in breadth" (OED burnish v.2, now obsolete.)



*

1. Epilogue to Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late (1679). It's spoken by a character from the play, the railer Thersites.
2. A Prologue. Written in 1689, published 1693. The poem's occasion and its "bashful Poet" aren't recorded.
3. Prologue to The Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery (1681)
4. (Second) Prologue to the University of Oxford (1681).
5. Prologue to Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673).
6. Prologue to Circe (1677). The play was by Charles Davenant. Two versions of the prologue survive; this is the second.

todd terry's show . . . todd terry's show . . .

 Contagious Killer Cuts, CD cover of the Limited Edition Import

Introducing one of my favourite-ever albums . . . but I'm not speaking from a position of expertise, far from it. Todd Terry's Contagious Killer Cuts: Compilation Volume One came out in 1999, but it didn't exist for me back then. (There never was a Volume Two.)

At the beginning of the 1990s I'd essentially stopped following pop music. It was a busy decade for me: young family, love, commuting, long hours, little sleep, debts, emotional highs and lows and highs. I wrote most of my best poems then, but there was minimal time for the receptive side of my aesthetic existence; I read, saw and heard little. (And so far as the last of these was concerned, it was all about rediscovering classical music.)

It wasn't until 2010 I happened across a CD of Contagious Killer Cuts in a pound shop and decided to give it a whirl. I knew Todd Terry's name, I'd had a record of his before. Todd was a big presence in the early days of the New York house scene back in the late 1980s; he comes from Brooklyn but it was in Europe his reputation first took off. (House music had been the last of my pop music passions, before I packed it all in).

Ever since that day the CD has never really moved far from my van stereo: it's 70 minutes of perfectly sequenced hedonistic dance music, a dance symphony. (There's also a bonus CD containing some other mixes; they're good stuff, but it's very rare that I get on to them.) Since I was always driving while listening, and since I didn't really care, through all those years I never tried to find out about this sound journey: who made the music, or why or when.




You can hear all of it here; or nearly all of it. . . Agonizingly, the final (16th) track of the main CD is missing (Jeanine Garcia's "Wildest Dreams"). The other thing to note is that though tracks 1-15 play in the right sequence, the track titles are all mixed up, so every single one is wrong!

*

But let's go back to the beginning. So here's our symphony's opening statement: "Shine On", produced by Tony Moran and sung by Cindy Mizelle.




[Video title is incorrect.]


Tony Moran is another DJ/producer from Brooklyn (and, like Todd Terry, still producing plenty of new music). As with most of the songs on Contagious Killer Cuts, we're looking at a stark gender-role split: male producers, female singers. But don't start visualizing grizzled svengalis and naïve trophies. More typically, these male producers were comparatively new on the block and the female singers were the more eminent artistes, some with established careers that long predated house music: Linda Clifford, Martha Wash, Jocelyn Brown, Shannon, for instance...  [Martha Wash (Two Tons O' Fun, Weather Girls) had done all her sisters a service a few years earlier by filing the lawsuit against Sony that led to legislation to make vocal credits mandatory on CDs.]

Cindy Mizelle, from NJ, has also had a long musical career. More recently she's been in Bruce Springsteen's backing band, and you can read more about her here:
https://brucespringsteen.net/band/cindy-mizelle

"Shine On" is a joyous breeze of fresh-air love, its heights all gospelly call-and-response. The snow-capped mountains, melismatic swoops, ripples of "strings", and show-tune key changes all make it a thrilling but somewhat anomalous inclusion (and no doubt that's why Todd sequenced it here at the very start). For sometimes an opening statement can be very different from the interior: like a red-painted house-door, or the famous Db tune at the beginning of Tchaikovsky's first Piano Concerto.

You could say that the moment when Contagious Killer Cuts really starts to be itself is at the end of track 1, when Cindy and the choir fade away into the thunderous incessant drum splashes of Track 2: the "Mike Rizzo Surf Drums Mix" of Wendy Phillips' "Love Never Changes" (neither Wendy nor her tune are much in evidence  -- but we'll get to hear them later, on track 10). That segue is the moment, I always think, when the vast scope of this CD and the art-form it represents begins to become apparent. The "Mahler 3" moment.

Here is that Track 2, "Love never Changes" (Wendy Phillips, Mike Rizzo Surf Drums Mix):




[Video title is incorrect.]

For this and the next few tracks it's all about digging in to the details of the rhythmic pulse, leading eventually to the pounding sexual challenge of "Deep" (Track 4, by the House Junkies featuring Linda Clifford); and then comes the first of the album's supreme moments, when this taut r'n'b tension finally surges into the release of chordal progression, in the form of Martha Wash's/Jocelyn Brown's "Something Goin' On" (Track 5), Todd Terry's own composition and production.

Here it is:




[Video title is incorrect.]


Definitely a song that merits sharing twice, so here's a Top of the Pops clip (the song reached No. 5 in the UK), just for the sheer joy of seeing Martha and Jocelyn in action (and Todd in the background).





After that sustained high, Track 6  (Judy Albanese's "You")  is the heart-still-racing post-coital afterglow: I thank God for giving me you...  (Judy Albanese's spell in the music industry was comparatively fleeting, just seven years or so: she now sells real estate in Rhode Island).

And here it is:




[Video title is incorrect.]


Back in 1999 this beautiful, physical, erotic and timeless dance space existed alongside the street documentary, transgression and fury of hip hop. By comparison its social commentary is more submerged, but it's there, particularly in the two pieces by Sash! (a German production trio): "Movemania" featuring Shannon (Track 8) and "Mysterious Times" featuring Tina Cousins (Track 15).

Both of these were hits in the UK, though of course I didn't know that. Until a few days ago I'd always assumed Contagious Killer Cuts was a wholly New York creation; which is predominantly true, but not altogether.

Here's the sublime DJ Delicious Mix of "Movemania" that appeared on Contagious Killer Cuts:




[Video title is incorrect.]


But how could I not append this? -- the video for Sash!'s original single mix of "Movemania":





As far as I know I'm the only person on the whole planet who rates Contagious Killer Cuts as an exceptionally wonderful album; or even a good album. There are no reviews anywhere, not even customer reviews. It's apparent from YouTube that many of the individual songs are cherished, but the fact is that the "album" is really an alien concept to house music. In the indispensable though incomplete Todd Terry discography on Discogs (207 items and counting) Contagious Killer Cuts appears unobtrusively in the category "DJ Mixes".

Did Todd Terry in 1999 know that he'd just created/compiled/curated a masterpiece? Probably not. But I like to fancy, as its haunting final track fades into a long-postponed silence, that he's singing along with Jeanine Garcia, and reflecting, as I always do: Never in my wildest dreams . . .

Oh yes, that final track. The CKC version isn't available online, but the following version's not too dissimilar. (Jeanine Garcia's name is shown here in its more common spelling of "Janine Garcia".)

Todd Terry, pictured on the 1997 single release of Something Goin' On

[Image source: https://www.discogs.com/Todd-Terry-Something-Goin-On/release/44979 .]

On listening

Listening helps us to understand. But understanding doesn't help us to listen.


It's possible to understand someone so well that we stop listening to them.


We stop attending to what they are saying, and instead we attend to what it tells us about what we understand.


Oh, that's so typical! we think. Or perhaps, You've changed your tune.


We've lost something that we once had. Once the words said something, but now they only mean something. We look behind the words. After all, it's not as if we're just getting to know each other!


Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.


But is it a pardon that people really want? Isn't it, rather, a hearing?

Those tricky willowherbs (Epilobium species)

Epilobium montanum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

1. OK, let's start in my garden, and probably in yours too, if you live in the UK or Ireland. This is Broad-leaved Willowherb (Epilobium montanum, Sw: Bergdunört) growing out of a flower-pot. It's a well-chosen name. The shape of the broad leaves, with their broad bases appearing heart-shaped (though they aren't), is unlike any of the others. The leaves on this specimen have gone a bit bronzy. 4-part stigma, capsules about 7cm.

[Very common throughout the British Isles. Also throughout Sweden but only common in the southern half. Incidentally the Swedish name for willowherb, dunört, means "down-wort" -- as in feather-down, referring to the feathery seeds. It's a mystery to me why Linnaeus named this species montanum (which berg translates).]

Epilobium montanum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Broad-leaved Willowherb. This specimen has more typical coloration: green leaves and red stems. The stems are round and often finely hairy, like this one, but the hairs are small and don't stick out much. You can see one of the leaf-stalks (petioles): on this species it's pretty short, but it's there.

The lower leaves are always opposite each other, but further up the stem they become alternate.

Epilobium montanum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Broad-leaved Willowherb. Don't expect to see the leaf stalks from above!

Epilobium montanum. Swindon, 30 May 2020.

Broad-leaved Willowherb. Here are the flowers. The petals are pure pink (not purplish) and, at 8-10mm, a little larger than any of the other medium-size willowherbs. 4-lobed stigmas.

Epilobium montanum. Swindon, 20 June 2020.

Broad-leaved Willowherb. I guess you don't really need this photo, but I think it's interesting. It shows a bizarre group of Broad-leaved Willowherbs near to where I live; their leaves are all in threes rather than twos. 

Epilobium montanum. Frome, 30 July 2023.

Warning! The smallish leaves on late growth can look very untypical. They may have narrowed bases and they may lack the normal toothed edges. The photo above, I promise you, is Broad-leaved Willowherb! Keep your eye on the other features (e.g. four-lobed stigmas, relatively large flowers) and you won't go far wrong.

Epilobium tetragonum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

2. Moving 100 meters up the road, this one is Square-stalked Willowherb (Epilobium tetragonum, Sw: Kantdunört). The pinkish-purplish flowers are quite small (5-7mm) and the stigmas are not lobed: they are simply club-shaped ("clavate" is the technical term). 

[Common in the southern British Isles, mostly England and Wales. Rare in the south of Sweden.]

Epilobium tetragonum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Square-stalked Willowherb. The capsules are quite long, typically 7-8cm but often reaching 10cm. (That's an important distinction from an otherwise similar species, Short-fruited Willowherb.)

(Yes, if you want to distinguish Epilobium species there's no getting around it, you do need to carry a measuring tape or a ruler. Sometimes you'll be measuring the capsules, sometimes the leaf-stalks, sometimes the open flowers.)

Epilobium tetragonum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Square-stalked Willowherb. The other easy-to-spot feature is the the very narrow strap-shaped leaves, more or less stalkless. Also, the four ridges on the stem are more pronounced, so you can see why it's called "square-stalked", though that's really a bit of an exaggeration. The stalk is still basically round, but with four pronounced ridges.

The upper part of the plant is minutely hairy, though often the hairiness is rather sparse. Anyway, none of the hairs stick out. The technical term is "appressed". You may shrewdly suspect that they are not actually stuck to the stem surface, and you're right, as you'll see if you look through a x20 lens. But they do stay remarkably close to it. Get familiar with this lens view, to avoid confusion with late-season American Willowherb (5), whose reduced hairiness may look similar to the naked eye, but where the lens reveals patent (sticking-out) hairs.

Epilobium parviflorum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

3. Right next to our previous plant, this very different one: Hoary Willowherb (Epilobium parviflorum, Sw: Luddunört). Small pinkish-purple flowers like Square-stalked Willowherb, but this time the stigmas are four-lobed. And of course the whole plant is densely hairy.

[Common in most of the British Isles, except the Scottish uplands. Common in some parts of Sweden: e.g. the far south, the Baltic islands and around Stockholm.]

Epilobium parviflorum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Hoary Willowherb. Emerging raceme, everything looking felty.

Epilobium parviflorum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Hoary Willowherb. Stems and leaves: all surfaces with sticking-out hairs. Stems round and unridged. Leaves becoming slightly narrower towards the base (unlike Epilobium montanum), and sessile (stalkless) but, unlike the next species, not clasping.

Epilobium parviflorum. Swindon, 20 June 2020.

Hoary Willowherb. An open flower, showing the four-lobed stigma.

A tip from Bob Leaney's guide (this is something I've fallen over myself): on this species the lobes can be prone to sticking together. So if your plant looks exactly like Hoary Willowherb but the flowers seem to have simple club-shaped stigmas, that'll be why. (You should be able to tease the lobes apart, if it really matters.)

Epilobium parviflorum. Swindon, 20 June 2020.

Hoary Willowherb. A typical well-grown plant: erect and quite tall, up to a meter.

Epilobium hirsutum. Swindon, 15 June 2020.

4. Another couple of hundred meters away, and here's the first flower of the year on this specimen of Great Willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum, Sw: Rosendunört), much the most noticeable of the group and the only one you might describe as "well-loved". A usually tall plant (to 1.8m), though you often see runty specimens growing out of kerb-sides. All surfaces noticeably hairy, though not quite as "felty" as the previous species. Clasping leaves. Big showy flowers (petals 10-16mm) Stigma four-lobed.

[Very common throughout the British Isles, except in the Scottish highlands. Only common in the far south of Sweden.]

Epilobium hirsutum. Swindon, 20 June 2020.

Great Willowherb. Five days later, and a lot more flowers.

Epilobium hirsutum. Swindon, 20 June 2020.

Great Willowherb. Close-up of stem and leaves, the leaf-bases clasping the stem. If you zoom in on the edge of the stem you can clearly see the two kinds of hairs; one kind is "patent" (sticks out sideways), the other kind stays close to the stem surface.

Epilobium tetragonum (left) and Epilobium ciliatum (right). Swindon, 23 June 2020.

5. Just round the corner. The plant on the right is American Willowherb (Epilobium ciliatum. Sw: Amerikansk Dunört or Vit Dunört). The stigmas are club-shaped like Square-stalked Willowherb (2), but what's unlike it is the stem, fruits and sepals are covered with small patent hairs, many with minute shining beads of liquid on the tips ("glandular"). (In late season the liquid beads may have disappeared and the sticking-out hairs may be much less apparent to the naked eye, but you'll see them through a x20 lens.)

[An introduced species but now common throughout the British Isles. Fairly common in southern and central Sweden.]


(The plant on the left above is Square-stalked Willowherb!)

Epilobium ciliatum. Swindon, 23 June 2020.

American Willowherb. Close-up showing the stems covered with patent hairs, many of them glandular. The other feature that differentiates it from Square-stalked Willowherb (3) is the short but definite leaf-stalk (petiole), 1.5-4mm.

Epilobium ciliatum. Swindon, 26 June 2020.

American Willowherb. A flower, showing the clavate (club-shaped) stigma. The flowers are only 3-6mm, the smallest among the medium-sized willowherbs. They're often pinkish-purple but these ones opened very pale, virtually white (only turning pink as they faded).

That is pretty normal (hence the alternative Swedish name Vit Dunört, "White Willowherb") but not so normal as on the species we're about to get on to, Pale Willowherb (6).

Anyway, below is an example of a pink-flowered American Willowherb (note clumsy use of the hand to stop the phone camera from bleaching out the colour!).

Epilobium ciliatum. Berkley Marsh (Somerset), 29 July 2023.

Epilobium roseum. Frome, 24 July 2024.

6. So here it is: Pale Willowherb (Epilobium roseum. Sw: Grendunört). 

All the willowherb species described up to now are very common and most readers will find them straight away, but this is a different kettle of fish. It's widespread, especially in lowland England and Wales, but often in rather small quantities. It's a plant of damp places like streams and canals, but it does also occur in towns, for example at the base of a shaded wall where moisture lingers, which is where I found these ones.

[It's native to Sweden, as to England, but I'm not sure how common it is. Grendunört means "Branch Willowherb", which I suppose must refer to the long leaf-stalks.]

Epilobium roseum. Frome, 24 July 2024.

Here are the flowers. In the British Isles, they usually open white and only turn pink when they fade, but they can also be pale pink. 

The stigma is club-shaped, so the flowers (4-7mm) look much the same as on pale-flowered forms of American Willowherb. The key difference is that Pale Willowherb has long leaf-stalks.

Epilobium roseum. Frome, 24 July 2024.

The leaf-stalks can be 1cm, even 1.5cm on the lowest leaves, and even halfway up the stem they are clearly longer than 4mm which is the maximum length attained by American Willowherb. 

This is easy to see once you stop to examine the plant, but it doesn't show up at a distance. So, are there any clues that suggest Pale Willowherb at a glance? Kind of.

-- White flowers, club-shaped stigmas.

-- Damp, probably shady, location.

-- Stem and leaves green, without any red on them. 

-- Leaf-bases tapering gently to leaf-stalk. (E.g. not heart-shaped).

-- Leaf-veins deeply impressed (though to be fair this is pretty normal on most willowherbs).

-- Leaf-teeth fairly close-set. 

None of these clues is infallible, but if your plant matches all of them, it's worth checking out those leaf-stalks. Good luck!

Epilobium roseum. Frome, 24 July 2024.

Pale Willowherb: an upper leaf. Note the neatly tapering shape, deeply impressed veins, and distinct leaf-stalk. 

In this photo you can also see the mix of stem-hairs, some sticking out and glandular, some appressed. Abundant in the upper part of the plant and on the fruit capsules, but often much sparser below. (Much the same as American Willowherb, really.) 

Epilobium roseum. Frome, 24 July 2024.

Epilobium obscurum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

[

I'm leaving this section as is, for now, but alas I think this is a misidentification. As time went by the fruits exceeded 7cm which never happens with obscurum. So I don't know. These willowherbs really are tricky!]

99. This is the other species currently in my garden: Short-fruited Willowherb (Epilobium obscurum, Sw: Mörk dunört). The petals are pinkish-purple and only 4-7mm. The stigmas are clavate (club-shaped), not divided into 4 lobes. But the key feature is the capsule length, only 4-6 cm. Another well-chosen name!  

[Common throughout British Isles. Uncommon in the southern half of Sweden.]

Epilobium obscurum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Short-fruited Willowherb. On my specimens the surfaces of the upper part of the plant are minutely hairy, giving the effect of a whitish bloom. The hairs don't stick out. (Apparently they can do on the hypanthium -- a very small area just below the flower, also known as the "floral collar" --, but my plants don't have that feature.)

Epilobium obscurum. Swindon, 17 June 2020.

Short-fruited Willowherb. The lower part of the plant is more or less hairless, except on the slightly raised ridges coming down from the leaf-bases. The leaves are quite narrow and more or less sessile (stalkless), but not so narrow as on Square-stalked Willowherb.

*

This post (which I'll continue to add to) is intended to be a user-friendly and non-technical guide to these common but confusing plants, focussing on the features that I've tended to find useful. If you want to see me struggling to get to grips with the more technical aspects, see this post from a year ago:

http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/08/medium-size-willowherbs-epilobium.html

https://bsbi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2022/02/BSBI-News-144-Epilobium.pdf

Here's a really helpful BSBI PDF by Bob Leaney in Norfolk, about common problems with identifying these willowherbs. He points out, for instance, that the glandular hairs on willowherbs don't actually have a glandular cell on the tip. The point is that once the beads of liquid are washed off or rubbed off they do not reappear. Hence it's best to check on freshly emerged growth.

"Is that what you'd do, Nolly?"

Jacket of a Portuguese translation of Narabedla Inc.

[Image source: Goodreads .]


Frederik Pohl: Narabedla Inc. (1988)


I retrieved this from the non-recyclable skip at the dump (where they can’t process hardcover books, so don't buy them, or publish them!). It had once been in a Wiltshire County Library but was marked WITHDRAWN and already looked ancient. I had no thought but to accept the random exposure to SF (a genre I've always avoided). Judging from the bites that came up on my wrist, I retrieved some other stuff too. My plan was, not to enjoy what I was reading but to close the door on it by writing about it here. It hasn’t really worked out like that.

Pohl’s method of making SF by reconstructing is well-documented. As with the vision of Norah Platt’s disconnected body-parts at the “barber’s”, the book sails joyfully past aesthetics, and they turn out not to matter too much; it clunks a bit, but it’s zestful and funny and plays a few tricks with your mind.

"Narabdela" is Aldebaran backwards, the red eye of Taurus, 65 light-years away from here. I saw it last week, and now I’ve been to the second moon of the seventh planet.

She had said ten minutes, but actually I was there in five. Of course, Tricia Madigan wasn’t... I looked round at the square -- not at the repellent monster-murdering-man centerpiece of it -- just trying to make sense of what I saw. Each of the streets that radiated from the square was a different style and period of architecture. There were thatched-roof cottages, like Norah Platt’s. There were high-rent-district ranch houses, like the one I borrowed from Malcolm Porchester. There were townhouse condo rows, streets of brownstone fronts, white frame houses with the kind of porches you see in old Andy Hardy movies.
   I looked up at the “sky” for help, but there was no help there. It was, I realized, a lot like the “sky” I’d seen in Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in the World Trade Center.... I turned at last to look at the agonized face of the man being crushed by the monster in the statue... did they have to show it so graphically?

The “sky” is a roof, as Nolly sees even now. It’s also not a statue, only an execution in slow time -- as in Don Giovanni. It wasn’t the World Trade Center but a go-box to a yacht. Davidson-Jones is about 200 years old. The real sky is a lot of starlight while they’re darkside; the Hyades look very close -- I’m not sure if that would be right. But Tricia really is a Texas baton-twirler who can make her hair any colour she likes. This is also Disneyland, isn’t it? But Pohl’s view of how Nolly’s consciousness registers another planet is credible -- the completely strange and the completely commonplace all mixed up. It was the kind of spot Pohl had been knocking around for years, of course.

Pohl was born in 1919 and was into SF early. Pohl’s social consciousness has been a thread in SF forever (it was always one way to go with it), most notably in his Kornbluth collaborations from the 1950s such as The Space Merchants, which registers the consumerism of the era of cars with fins, household appliances, and Vance Packard’s books about the ad industry. Pohl’s most productive time as a non-collaborating author came later, from the mid-1970s onwards. The interest in society and social responsibility and moral conundrums is manifest throughout Narabedla Inc., along with amused interests in science, accountancy, working out in the gym, opera and testosterone. The latter two are a part of the book that Pohl transforms out of James M. Cain’s Serenade (1938). Pohl good-naturedly severs most of the raw and thoroughly non-PC power of the earlier book, resolves the effeminizing Winston Hawes into the inter-planetary Davidson-Jones, and produces a medical explanation (adult mumps) for the swollen glands that affect both the baritone-hero’s voice and his testicles; in Serenade, this was all about loss of toro.

The name “Narabedla” isn’t Pohl’s invention either, because in 1957 there was Falcons from Narabedla by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a prolific author of science fantasy who was also a gay feminist and wrote I am a Lesbian (1962) under the pseudonym of Lee Chapman. She died in 1999 and her ashes were scattered on Glastonbury Tor.

Pohl was a super-fit sixty-nine when he wrote Narabedla Inc. -- he’s still writing today, I think* -- but it’s only natural that serious illness should be another of its prominent themes. As Rosmarie Waldrop has reminded us, via Tristan Tsara, collage produces self-portrait; and that’s how Narabedla Inc. sunnily comes across.

You won't be looking for prose style here, but after you’ve snapped it up for the story you still have little memory-lapses of radiant oddness like these:

So he does like a dog when it hangs out his tongue, only Barak don’t have a tongue, so he gets his cooling from evaporation in that ugly patch of fur by his dipstick, you know? He just leaks into it and lets it evaporate to cool off.

all three of the little kids hopped over the fence. Whistling and chirping in joy, they ran after the scurrying mice. Then each of them picked up one mouse by the tail and swallowed it. I could see the little animals writhing and struggling as they went sliding down those transparent digestive tracts.

*

NB Wikipedia lists this book under the British title Narabedla Ltd, and that's the title most people seem to use.

*Frederik Pohl died in 2013, aged 93.

[This and the following two notes are slightly-revised flotsam from my former website. This one was written in 2006.]

Jacket of the first edition of The Sun Chemist

[Image source: WorldOfBooks  .]

Lionel Davidson - The Sun Chemist (1976)


This is as good, perhaps, as The Riddle of the Sands. Of course, I try to take it apart to see how it works. The most evident technical challenge with a can't-put-it-down adventure is to hold the reader -- to avoid, or stave off, the disillusionment that threatens when mysteries are finally unravelled and the end looms in sight.

The Sun Chemist begins as a mystery of finding out, full of clues, an unfailingly entertaining procedure while it lasts. Later, it switches to a different kind of adventure, the one where there is someone (who?) on the narrator’s trail. Here, the author needs to be nimble. I am not quite clear why the biffing of assistant Hopcroft, so early in the book, doesn’t induce more paranoia. It's all very well for the narrator to talk about it flippantly, but would he really think the same way? And when, finally, the narrator has the precious manuscript in his hands, we need to accept that he doesn’t think more coolly -- which might mean, for instance, staying in a provincial library, taking dozens of copies, and mailing them all over the world. He's perfectly safe; he has infinite time; but instead he hustles wantonly off to Heathrow airport with the manuscript in his bag, thus re-entering the very narrow corridor that his enemies can keep under observation.

Still, the resulting loss of the manuscript is necessary, not only for credibility but to produce the right sort of ending, muted, defeated, still delightfully flippant.

We mustn't imagine that the areas of structural weakness (or “nimbleness”) could be avoided. If not precisely in this form, they’d emerge somewhere else, because the basic premise that we readers agree to concede (“the real world and the adventure world are the same”) is a false one. As a form, nevertheless, the adventure story can be better or worse.

Adventure stories get better, too, as they age, because they start yielding up incidental information about their culture. This one presents a fascinating view of young Israel, without the shadow of Palestine, that's now wholly closed to us. (We want Igor Druyanov to succeed, for some reason -- perhaps an ingrained pursuit of truth, in this case happily not playing into the hands of corporations... For why should scientists seem so wearily to do so? Are the good of humanity and the good of the corporate really just the same thing, corporates being the executives of our benefits?)

Oh yes, one more thing -- Ham Wyke’s crucial slip about the warm desk-lamp isn't credible -- no-one would confuse spoken material with experienced material in this sort of way. As a species we're skilled deceivers and we soon learn to keep the two categories far apart in our mental libraries.


*

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolymsky_Heights .]


A brief addendum on Lionel Davidson's Kolymsky Heights (1994): This big book is (and is commonly recognized as) an exceptional triumph of the thriller genre. Only at the very death (on ice in the Baring Strait) does a certain level of doubt intrude. It’s a book written with great intuition; it doesn’t need to add up. Never once do we hear what the hero thinks about the extraordinary things he is shown inside the research station. The title refers to a not very important range of hills. The hero and heroine are reunited in the end -- very old-fashioned. The whole Japan / tramp-steamer episode is really an irrelevance (and surely Porter’s arrival at Green Cape is a bad way of drawing attention to yourself, close to the very spot where you plan to operate).

None of this matters. The book is an immense record of what people did. It’s very exciting. The “more” which the thriller is supposed at its best to be weighted with (“more than just a thriller”) is simply the sense of being there; fiddling with an engine, with gears, waiting for a flight. Siberia is drawn on for its mythic power -- the most impossible place to get into, the most impossible place to get out of.

As in The Sun Chemist, the quest is not for riches or salvation but information -- credibly detailed fictional science. It hangs here in a vacuum, this central section, with its lovely meeting with Ludmilla. As if the author invites you to forget it if you don’t want to bother with it.

An early scene such as Lazenby catching a salmon has nothing germane for the plot, but it’s a scene that confesses to being part of a thriller. “His gear was some way back, and when he reached it the light was too bad for him to see the gauge on his weighing hook.” Already there's the urgency, the recalcitrance of things, we're already being thrilled.


*


(Lionel Davidson was born in 1922 in Hull. He died in 2009.)


[Written in 2001-2002]

One of Michael MacCurdy's woodcut illustrations for a 1985 edition of The Man Who Planted Trees

[Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/854839572996892042/ .]



Jean Giono: The Man Who Planted Trees (1953)


According to his daughter (in an afterword), Jean Giono (1895 - 1970), a hardworking professional writer well thought of by Gide, Malraux and Henry Miller, did not realize that his contribution to the Reader's Digest  feature The Most Remarkable Man I ever Met was supposed to be factual. He did write his story to give the impression it was factual, with precise dates and locations. The story is about a shepherd who slowly reafforests an area of moorland, and of the remarkable social regeneration that follows. I rather tend to think that Giono's deceit was intentional, gaining the story welcome publicity and posing the question rather more sharply in our minds, whether this kind of afforestation scheme would really be practicable and whether it would indeed work out with the good effects described in the fable.

[I have doubts about the survival of the seedlings in a location otherwise so short of leafy shoots. I think because of the wind you'd have to make (or grow) windbreaks first, and fence the saplings, which could not go unnoticed. Nature is intolerant of introduced plantings. But I don't really know.]

Just as Elzéard Bouffier ignored both world wars, so the story ignores all social and economic changes and supplies no answer about rural employment, subsuming everything to the dream of an acorn. Since Bouffier lives in total isolation his class and culture cease to exist and do not trouble a middle-class audience -- Wordsworth had done this too. It is thus a fairy tale in which little unseen acts of altruism visibly transform the world. It is an extension of the much-cherished dream that beautifying our garden does good to our society, and that it is not necessary to communicate with that society in order to benefit it. In fact it's better not to: "If they'd suspected what he was up to they'd have tried to stop him".

Giono is good on the forest as a reservoir of water and on nature's ability, once properly started, to grow on hugely and to self-transform. He saw the power in the acorn rather than its vulnerability. Belief in the virtues of tree-planting was nothing new, but Giono pitched his fable not at estate-owners but at helpless, ordinary people. His simple tale with its optimistic message thus provided both a fantasy and a striking contribution to popular environmental awareness in the West, subsequently of great political importance. His tale was self-validating, itself an acorn that burgeoned astonishingly.

The implications for a political literature are: that it has to be so simple as to be held totally in the mind after one reading; that all style is counter-productive; that its political meaning is created by the reader rather than the author. 

*

(The original French title is: L'homme qui plantait des arbres.)


[Written in 2007]