a mixed dozen

Granta is a British literary magazine, published quarterly.  It calls itself  ‘the magazine of new writing’ on a range of topics, and has been the first to publish many later well-known writers.

Granta 103, The Rise of British Jihad, has as usual several interesting pieces of writing and several to take or leave.  The cover story, by BBC journalist Richard Watson, is well worth reading (there’s an extract here).  He investigates the series of events, failures, poor decisions and mistakes  that allowed Britain’s indigenous terrorists to grow and develop.  Going back to the first Balkan war, Watson explores how young Muslim men in Britain became inspired to take part in jihad, ultimately leading to the London tube and bus bombings in 2005.  He also probes how MI5 made a pragmatic but ultimately fatal choice to ignore terrorist organisations to use the UK as a base so long as they were focused on targets elsewhere.  Watson’s piece is neutral and balanced – he makes no calls for heads on platters, but just allows the facts to tell the story.  There is a video interview with Watson here.

east wind melts the ice

Liza Dalby is one of my favourite authors on Japan.  She’s an anthropologist who has studied (and lived) Japanese culture since the late 1960s.  East Wind Melts The Ice is a collection of 72 short essays, based on an ancient Chinese almanac which divides the year into 72 five-day periods.  Each five-day period has its own maxim to describe what happens in nature in those five days of the year.  These vary from the obvious (‘peach blossoms open’) to the obscure (‘moles become quails’).

Dalby explains these maxims and uses them as a jumping-off point for a short essay observing nature either around her home in Berkley, or in Japan.  In Japan, this format is called a saijiki, a “year’s journal” which entwines personal experience, natural phenomena and seasonal categories. She wrote two versions of each essay – one in English and one in Japanese, and often comments on the difficulty of this, observing things that are ‘obvious’ in one culture and obscure in another.

Dalby has has a good eye for what is going on in the natural world as time passe and plants bloom and die, birds migrate, animals appear and disappear and weather changes.  She is also a lyrical and descriptive writer without being effusive and cloying.  She covers an eclectic range of topics and often pokes fun at her own mistakes.

East Wind Melts The  Ice is the sort of exercise I’d love to try myself, as a way of sharpening my observation and writing skills, though I know I’d never have the stamina to keep it up for a year.  The only disappointment I found with the book was the sappy subtitle: ‘a guide to serenity throughout the seasons’.  It’s not.  It annoys me that some publisher somewhere seems to have thought that a book about nature and culture won’t sell unless it’s given some sort of self-help angle.

I enjoyed this book very much, and it would make a great gift for anyone you know who’s into gardening or nature watching.  Liza Dalby’s Geisha and Kimono are also both very good.

East Wind Melts The Ice – a guide to serenity through the seasons
Liza Crihfield Dalby
Vintage, 2008