steepholm

What really baffles me about Wrede is the notion that any writer would find "cool megabeasts" more interesting to write about than people. Cos yeah, yr average dinosaur offers so much scope for character development, witty dialogue, complicated personal relationships...

That was also a stand-out post to me.

I've only lived in North America very briefly, but on several occasions out there I felt a powerfully deep and disorientating sense of disconnection from the landscape around me. One was while driving from an airport to the hotel where we were staying: down a long grey corridor of road, with high concrete walls rising up steeply on either side, and only a slate sky and boiling red sun visible. It was like being on Mars.

In rural NC, I often felt as if certain new buildings (supermarkets, big houses) were lying only lightly upon a landscape that was waiting for the infrastucture to falter to be able to grow back over them. And having said all that, I also saw rural wooden houses and parts of small towns which felt entirely embedded in the landscape.

Yes, Walmart syndrome, I called it. You get it here as well, in out-of-town retail parks and industrial estates, but in the US whole cities have it sometimes.

That does ring true for me. I haven't spent much time in the US, but I think the Canadian experience might be a little different. There's much more untamed wilderness here. In the south of Canada, there's this almost straight line across the country where the white settlers ... erm settled, for want of a better word, almost entirely along the tracks of the good old CPR railway line and spreading out from there. But we have the North, mostly still pretty much as it was, and the Coast - at least the West Coast - with places accessible still only by boat or rather perilous small planes. So I think we are more aware of the numinousness of the land, the sacred quality that the aboriginal peoples felt and respected. But there's that palimpsest effect in Britain that we don't really have here that I think Cooper expresses really well - and you get that coming through in her writing, and that of people like Penelope Lively and Alan Garner, too. We don't have that in North America at all, really - maybe because our history is so short.

Not short, but disconnected from what went before, so that it's like camping among alien ruins.

Coming from New England, I grew up amid abandoned chimneystacks and cellars, and stone walls swallowed up in woods: cornlands and pastures that a demi-wilderness long since reclaimed. The English brought John Barleycorn with them: he died.

Nine

I think this thread gets at something of my experience of growing up in the US. . . when I was sixteen, I really thought that I wanted to move to the UK as an adult, and a lot of that had to do with that same sense that Europe was better, because it had continuous history. One thing I was consciously aware of liking about living in China, despite the horrid modern Communist architecture and millions of new things being built and constructed within six months, was the way that really ancient areas still lurked, at least to some degree, within the awful contemporary stuff. It's something that I've missed, even if I did live in the US for my entire childhood. So I definitely think the point in your quotation and 's post is very strong - it didn't have to be this way, and it was actually the people who created my culture that made it this way.

That is a very good post, and interesting points you make too.

I don't know - part of me wonders if things in this regard have possibly got worse rather than better in the US over the last couple of decades. As a child, I only lived there for three years ('66 to '69) but I can well remember a series of children's books I got from the library and loved to bits - each one was about a child from a different Indian tribe living - oh, maybe a couple of hundred years ago. (Irish couple!) I've no idea if they were any good or not, but they were at least available, just as a similar series about girls living in some of the colonial states (-ish, roughly that idea anyway) was available, with the assumption that kids would be interested to learn about that part of the history of North America, just because it was interesting! And I can remember being desperately keen to go to see Chaco Canyon a few years later when we visited the Southwest. Fair enough, I was a nerdy kid and loved historical fiction of many sorts, but the point is that it was there for me to access, in a perfectly regular public library in Annapolis (early if temporary capital of the United States and not about to forget it). And it wasn't even just a book about 'Indian culture', but books about specific tribes. Not that this should be an amazing thing, of course, just that in context, it is sadly worthy of mention.

In contrast, the things that have been said during Mammothfail about the disappearance from schools of the pre-Pilgrim part of US history are pretty shocking. Maybe those books I remember have been adequately replaced in libraries by authentic ones, but it doesn't sound terribly likely.

I haven't been following this enough to know much about what people have said is being taught in their schools, but. . . I don't know. As a kid, growing up, I certainly read plenty of children's books about Native American characters (again - no idea if they were any good or not). I also read Native American myths and legends. And we had a long unit in middle school, required by NY state, about the Iroquois (although I remember being kind of annoyed as a kid that everyone in NY state, no matter where they lived, had to learn about the Iroquois, but no one ever learned about the Algonquians who actually lived in the area where I grew up).

The thing was, though, that almost nothing that I read or that people taught me ever really gave me any sense that there was a connection between this history and my own present-day existence. I guess in school they stressed that the Iroquois had influenced the US Constitution, and we did have a lacrosse team - but, other than that, it didn't feel the same as reading colonial and post-colonial American history, where it was always stressed that this was the history of my culture, despite the fact that my own ancestors had only arrived in the US 100 years ago.

I don't know. I think it may be where we are from and where we look to for continuity. One of the things that blew my mind this term was how many students couldn't get their heads round the fact that the English were not the first Europeans in North America -- or even the first Europeans of the immediate post-Columbian era. In order to rationalize what they 'knew' -- that Jamestown was the first settlement -- and the fact that the first European settlement was established by the Spanish, some decided that Jamestown had been founded by the Spanish. That's just bizarre. But these kids were raised on the East Coast.


I was raised on the West Coast, and lived for my first 9 years in a town where there were buildings as old as or older than the buildings in the little town where I now live (the oldest here date back to the mid-18th C). But the oldest ruins in my hometown are the foundations of cabins where the enslaved Chumash lived. We were raised knowing that several of the local tribes had been wiped out in one way or another by the Spanish, and then by the Yankees who moved in and intermarried with the local grandee families. Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins was set on an island we could almost see on a clear day, and the feathered cloak that the woman in the book made was in the local historical museum.

So for us, there was never the sort of continuity that you get in much of the US. California was something that happened along a parallel timeline, and eventually joined to the main narrative. Most of the people I know who are my age and older kind of boggle at people who want to force English on everyone, or ban bilingual education, because we grew up in towns where most people were at least a little bilingual, and where many of the Spanish-speakers had been around as long as the Anglos, or longer. Street names are often in Spanish.

And yet, because most of the California tribes were wiped out or driven away before the big Anglo migrations, there's also a sort of disconnect, I think. Because the Spanish can be blamed for it. Still, if there is a continutity, I think it's different.

In terms of architecture, there are places in the west that are definitely built up in ways that are more in tune with the natural surroundings. On the coasts, in the more remote areas, at least. And up in the mountains. But by and large, I don't think that's so true. It's something that I find very jarring, and I grew up there. The imposition of technology on the landscape is almost inescapable.

As a USian who feels most comfortable in 'old' towns in the US, and really most comfortable in Europe, I don't know how much it has to do with notions of oldness, though. That's part if it for me. Part is that in older places, even those that are only a couple of hundred years old, there is more greenery. But in Europe, what does it for me is the buildings that incorporate older buildings, and the evidence of structures that were built into the environment in ways that used the landscape. It's in the ways that people both worked with, and also sometimes co-opted their environment that is attractive.

Thanks for that. It provides another perspective - and another history - I'd not been familiar with. (I speak as one for whom the phrase 'Old California' conjures only the black-and-white Zorro series.)