As Highway One wends its way north, about an hour from SF it threads through the chicane of Point Reyes Station. A short jaunt for any Bay area foodie, this tiny village is home to the Cowgirl Creamery (artisan organic cheeses) and Marin Sun Farms (pasture raised meats, poultry & eggs). Pack a chilly bin to bring home the bacon but for more immediate hunger pangs, try the Bovine Bakery or Osteria Stellina.
Here you are surrounded by a rich pastoral landscape that extends several misty miles to the Pacific Ocean and the beautiful Point Reyes National Seashore. Local farmers think beyond economies of scale and the lush, hilly fields are delineated by hedgerows where wildlife scampers, flutters and lurks. Like a Hardy scene, dairy cattle plod the muddy lanes from pasture to shed, udders swinging pendulously. Life is as it should be.
The people of Point Reyes Station read well for the bookstore, Point Reyes Books, is small but perfectly formed – its walls are hung with crafted quilts, a chandelier drops splendidly overhead and the curating is spot on. I ought to bring a sleeping bag and pillows next time and ask the owner if I can camp overnight just to get my browsing done. (I wonder do libraries and bookstores ever host sleepovers? Interesting idea.) Point Reyes Station is truly an inspiring place, where nature is revered, where quality is paramount, & where life’s simple pleasures are obvious. I lifted an armful of consciousness-raising books, seeking something. Perhaps just to reset my sights on a better way of living and to find ways to get there.
Shift Your Habit elaborates lists of ways in which you can change your day-to-day life, making your footprint that bit lighter. If we all manage 10 or 12 small changes it will make a significant difference, is Rogers’ message. It is therefore the perfect book for those of us who want to save the earth but don’t feel inclined to endure any hardships. And that would be most of us, I imagine.
Yet, this general assumption that our existing lifestyles can carry on while we endeavour to save the planet through agreeable minor modifications is eloquently quashed by Gus Speth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World. Speth has spent his life in the field of mainstream environmentalism, and while he still believes in its credo of reduce/reuse/recycle, he also views it as merely incrementalism that will do nothing more than slow the juggernaut. He criticises our slavery to capitalism (i.e. materialism, consumerism, commodification, corporate globalisation and the economic growth fetish) and calls for a shift towards a new consciousness with profoundly different values, somewhere between and beyond capitalism and socialism. Speth seems wise and prescient. While scientists & environmentalists increasingly warn of doom, Speth’s ideas certainly encourage my hopes more than my fears which makes for refreshing relief.
The Story of Stuff has the same message – we need to shift our values towards non-materialism – but it really hits home at a household level. Annie Leonard spells out her message loud and clear. In the affluent West we, who can afford it, don’t pay the full price for what we consume. Remember that Apollo 13 line, “Houston, we have a problem”? Well, let’s re-jig that. USA (UK, etc), we are the problem. People elsewhere, who can little afford it, pay for us with their ill health, their dire working conditions and their degraded environments. Reading this book is an epiphany. Those questions you haven’t (yet?) asked yourself about how you happen to have a crammed closet while kids in India live on top of the dump are answered here. This book doesn’t work on your habits, it works on your values. For those who like a bargain, as well as for those who simply prefer not to accumulate material goods, Annie has kindly provided an Internet film for free.
I recently spent a long weekend with my family in Portland’s Pearl district. In fact, we were mostly in Powell’s famous bookstore which is enormous and we seemed only to resurface for food & sleep. My 10 year old daughter was so taken with the place that she announced she wants to work in Powell’s when she grows up. It was a proud moment. Their concept is brilliant: new and used books side by side, priced accordingly. Its vast colour-coded rooms are broadly differentiated by subject. I spent as much time in the cavernous Rose Room (for kids) as I could, but the gravitational pull toward the Orange Room for “the home body” was too much so I occasionally slipped out leaving the bairns engrossed in Tin Tin, Bill Bryson and The Dangerous Book for Girls. The Pearl Room on the 3rd floor holds the sacred chamber of rare books, as well as the architecture shelves, where I discovered Witold Rybczynski (architecture critic on Slate) and bought two of his books from the 1980′s: Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World.
We stayed in the Northwest Hostel which was great but they were fully booked on our last night so we simply had to decamp to the fabulous but essentially low-key Ace Hotel. Squeezed between Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Clyde Common restaurant, the Ace is a cocoon of comfort. When you walk into the lobby, it’s like going back in time and forward in time at the same time. The rooms are warm, spare, retro, industrial, compact and quiet. I’d love to say it’s awesome but I’m British so I can’t. The felt draught excluders set on the window sashes reminded me of something I made in primary school craft class, and I could see Powell’s, too. It was almost unbearably perfect.
The Pearl district is quite bipolar as a result of only recent urban renewal. Its outskirts are tattered and bohemian; its innards, composed & quirky. Upmarket tenants have taken over the old brick boarding houses & warehouses to provide hotels, art galleries, clothing retailers, brewery pubs and cafes in which to take shelter from the possibly inclement weather, yet the homeless still stroll its corridors and curl up in its nooks at night. It can feel a little uncomfortable when you are on the, er, comfortable side of this equation. 
The tramps stared in at the lobby of the Ace, whiskers pressed against the glass. As I sipped my coffee and perused my new books I felt a sharpened sense of who, what & where I was. I liked that jolt of perspective but all the same, is this sort of self-consciousness the ultimate middle-class conceit? I’m constantly threatening myself with this question. I remember being struck by something Daniel Day-Lewis said when interviewed by Parkinson, that an essential element in his choice of acting as a career was to be able to regularly escape from what he fundamentally is – a middle-class Englishman. Confronting one’s social background, fortunate or not, can be a bitter sweet experience. I brought home a heavy load of books but the juxtapositions I found in the Pearl, the NW hostel, The Ace and Powell’s: retro and modern, used and new, poverty and elegance – the inspiration they gave me and the questions they raised for me, are just as big a handful.
Two good books regarding traditional British ways of life have come my way recently.
Hopping, by Melanie McGrath, based upon true lives, is a fictional portrait of a family from London’s East End. Set in the early 20th century, they spend their autumns picking hops in rural Kent, as do most of their neighbours in a mass seasonal migration. This book deserves much credit for its chronicling of this little-known part of Britain’s social history.
Cotters & Squatters, by Colin Ward is an academic work on the history of squatter’s rights. According to ancient lore, a house built surreptitiously, and without interruption, in one night on common land affords the builder the right to live there indefinitely and freely. It was not often as simple as that, as the book reveals. “The land is ours!” is the rallying cry and Colin Ward is sympathetic to the housing issues faced by the poor. Due to centuries of formal enclosure of wild spaces and, more recently, surburban expansion, common land covers only 3% of England today. It is increasingly difficult to live outside the formal economy and/or in unconventional dwellings.
Marie Antoinette idealised poverty, as evidenced by her idyllic little hamlet within the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. As patronising as this sounds, it was her escape from the tyranny of excess. Nostalgia for simpler times and places affects many of us today, for similar reasons.
toast catalogue aw09 ::via homeshoppingspy
Retailers co-opt our nostaliga into their brands. I fall for it all the time – the goods, the catalogue, the store concept. David Brooks coined the phrase bobo (bourgeois bohemian) for me and anyone else who fell for the Toast aw 2009 collection which focused on cosy English home comforts – woollen blankets, hot water bottles and the like. I recognised that some of the collection was photographed in the kitchen at Charleston, home of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant et al. – the quintessential bohemian English house.
I am not alone in feeling discombobulated by the gap between my nostalgia for the simple life and my materialistic tendencies. We try to unburden by decluttering, downsizing, gaining whitespace, or relocating, as if we hope the meaning of life will come fluttering out like a disturbed moth. So many of us choose to live (and love) our stimulating, frenetically-paced, accumulative city lives but often feel that truth, peace, meaning & happiness lie elsewhere. Think of the plethora of books around on havens, cottages, and off-the-grid hideaways. But these dichotomies – here versus there, now versus then, good versus bad – are too simplistic. We are complex, eclectic creatures.
kelmscott edition frontispiece ::via morris online edition
Nostalgia is a fantasy about the past, but I believe it is a desire to carry forward ideas that are worth keeping. William Morris had one eye idealistically looking ahead, and the other eye nostalgically looking back through a rose-tinted monocle, when he wrote his utopian novel, News from Nowhere. Anti-industrial, anarchistic and aesthetic, this socialist manifesto-as-fiction describes a pastoral landscape inhabited by happy, healthy people who enjoy their work and nature. It’s low on science & technology, after all, it was written by the father of the Arts & Crafts Movement in 1890, but it is full of insights. I felt warmed and engaged by its ideas when I read it; nostalgic for a future imagined 120 years ago.
the booksmith on haight ::by jennifer
I was on Haight Street today and noticed the window display in the Booksmith – my local independent bookstore. An incredible array of hand-dyed air mail envelopes is haphazardly bundled, piled up & tumbling off a table. Others are fluttering from the wall as if some benevolent breeze with a beautiful mind has just created a traveler’s inspiration board. I took a really average photo, I know. Someone who works there did a much better job – see her excellent shots here. Even so, I like how my shot reflects the buildings across the street and how the lamp hovers and glows as if surprised & curious.
It was a lovely day in SF today – sunny & foggy. It was St.Valentine’s Day of course, but I was also celebrating my birthday. (As the French say, I’m just a tiny bit older than 25.) Here are some shots taken today:
all photos taken at the ferry building or the embarcadero :: by jennifer
Seduced by Tom Ford’s movie and having a perpetual soft spot for Colin Firth, I recently bought a copy of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, A Single Man. It is an incomparably detailed and beautiful novel worthy of the finest presentation. Nevertheless, mine is a 1978 paperback (Avon/Bard, ISBN: 0-380-37689-X) bought for $2. Yet this humble softcover adds evidence to the aphorism: less is more. It has a time-burnt patina. Page edges are toasted with age and it has a sweet, old-fashioned aroma not unlike a neglected pan of burnt homemade toffee. The cover has a mesmerising drawing of Isherwood by artist, Don Barchardy. The intensity of Isherwood’s gaze portrays an honesty between artist and subject – but of course, they were partners.
I am certain it is the dual nature of books, the literary work and imagery contained within, and the book as a sensuous object in itself, that has lured me to love them so much. That is not to say I’m unenthusiastic about e-book technology and where it is leading us. I have Kindle on my iPhone and it’s great for traveling light but I haven’t quite got beyond considering my iPhone as merely a reference tool, a vade mecum. I think it’s partly because my iPhone doesn’t smell like toffee.
I was thinking how Dan Pearson’s fabulous new book Spirit: Garden Inspiration evokes British naturalist, the late Roger Deakin, (particularly the chapter on Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor), when I noticed a silvery slug trail across the ceiling. Roger was well-known for embracing nature’s forays into his home at Walnut Tree Farm in Suffolk. Bumblebees, crickets, newts, swallows and hedgehogs all came and went as they pleased. I too, am happy to share my living space with a slug – if it keeps him out of my herb garden.
I’ve plunged into Roger’s books this past year. They are brimming with elegance, humour and a quintessential Englishness. In brief: Waterlog is a celebration of water in the British landscape and a lament on the loss of wild & lido swimming to society; Wildwood, published posthumously, is an exploration of woodland places and their human connections, from Aboriginal Utopia to walnut trees in Kyrgyzstan, and, finally, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is an anthology of excerpts from his journals.
Roger’s beloved home is an ever-present spirit in his writing and featured strongly in obiturial pieces, such as that by Robert Macfarlane. It is as if Roger’s home was, without question, an extension of his Self. How many people really live so truthfully? Photos of the grounds around Walnut Tree Farm express tranquility: the moat where Roger swam and the wooden caravan in which he often slept (see Caught by the River with photos by the very talented Justin Partyka). In a captivating BBC radio 4 broadcast, entitled “The House”, its sounds can be heard, from the massive creaking and groaning of its timbers in a storm, to the urgent buzzing of a queen bee at its window, alongside Roger’s compassionate commentary. He estimated that his house, a traditional Suffolk long house, was built using 250 trees. It had once been a wild wood.
