Month: September 2021

Hookland 9/1/21 22:33:41

@inkyswampboy When the goddess shows up in the books, there is a sense of awe in both animals and reader. It is a powerfully realised fantasy world that many of us can take lessons from.

Hookland 9/1/21 23:09:52

@bob_threemthree I think I have read all of Uttley. Even in the Grey Rabbit stories there is a depth of lore that many folk writers fail to match and certainly an eye to the graft of ruralism that is absent from bloated bucolicism so many offer.

Hookland 9/1/21 23:16:07

@bob_threemthree She is an esoteric scientist and a pagan at heart. Yes, she is an establishmentarian as well, but she is so riddled with kindness and compassion it‰Ûªs not the sort of conservatism anyone in the modern world tends to recognise.

Hookland 9/1/21 23:27:00

@bob_threemthree There is also a sense that most of her conservatism is ecological or a desire to preserve things she thought close to extinction – lose a field, lose a job to a machine and the lore goes with it et al – which is also balanced with her belief in trajectory of science.

Hookland 9/1/21 23:30:26

@bob_threemthree Uttley is complex and beyond the easy reductionism that gets thrown around by her detractors. I find her sharp, serrated tongue quite loveable as it is often in service to radical truth telling, but I can also see its cruelty. Overall though, damn smart, damn kind, damn readable.

Hookland 9/1/21 23:31:12

Most reporters have notebooks with pages of things told to them in strictest confidence. I don’t know a reporter in Hookland who hasn’t got whole notebooks of things too impossible, too insane to print. Stories like the Bardon Moss Man. – Mike Griffin, reporter on The Hook Post

Hookland 9/1/21 23:36:48

@bob_threemthree I remember reading her to my god-daughter years ago, (hello Lucy-Anne), and saying: ‰ÛÏYou can be a scientist and still believe in faÌÇries.‰Û

Hookland 9/1/21 23:45:48

@bob_threemthree I am an animist – scratch most Hookladers and you’ll find some form of animist – so her reading of the land chimes with my relationship to it. Yet, re-reading as an adult, one of the most gratifying things is her anti-bucolic stance in ruralism and her animism.