#woodlanders

[the-forest-library]

I am in love with Strudel, Simon, and Sally

[egdonheath]

From Mary Webb’s Shropshire, I am back to Thomas Hardy’s Blackmoor Vale and enjoying The Woodlanders, one of his Wessex novels and his favorite. The cover painting is Waverly Oaks, 1864 by Winslow Homer

It starts a bit slowly to set the stage, but around the halfway point, it becomes dramatic. It is a criticism of classism. Hardy shows how it is easy to idealize a world beyond one’s experience and how dangerous it can be to enter that world without knowing what you are striving towards and what you are leaving behind. Relatedly Hardy draws a contrast between the steadfast traditions and morality of the poor, pastoral lives with the capriciousness and corruption of the gentry. (The sale of the beloved locks of Marty South, a peasant girl, to the rich, former actress, Felice Charmond, is symbolic of this difference between genuine vs fake.) The story also highlights the limited options of most women and the pressure of women to marry. The plot & characters seem more conventional than the other Hardy novels I’ve read, and it isn’t my favorite Hardy, but it is a story worth reading. 3/5

Excerpts:

It had sometimes dimly occurred to him (Giles Winterborne) that external phenomena – such as the lowness or height or color of a hat, the fold of a coat, the make up a boot, or the chance attitude of a limb at the instant of view– may have a great influence upon feminine opinion of a man’s worth – so frequently founded on nonessentials…

And yet to every bad there is worse.

Nothing ever brought home to her with such force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character.

[woodlanders]

The famous Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.

[toastedbuckwheat]

Youth weighed down by the crown

A sketch of the King of the Alder Realm soon after his Grandmother, the Old Queen, passed the function.

[thoughtportal]

Indigenous Women Are Publishing the First Maya Works in Over 400 Years

A bookmaking collective in San Cristobal de las Casas is helping keep the Tzotzil language alive.

The book that had caught my eye on the leafless tree featured the face of Kaxail, whom some call the Maya goddess of the wilderness, made from recycled cardboard, corn silk, and coffee. Inside the book, 295 handmade pages and silkscreen illustrations tell Tzotzil women’s stories of love, death, birth, marriage, sex, and survival, deploying an elaborate syntax that’s changed little since the Mayas’ rule here in the year 600. (Various attempts to kill that syntax, first by Spanish conquistadors and then by Mexico’s government, have proved fruitless.)

“We want to show the world that the Spanish conquistadors all those years ago did not destroy our culture,” Petra says as she traces the outline of Kaxail’s somber face. “We may have changed and adapted to modern times, but our language, traditions, and way of life essentially remain the same. Recording our Tzotzil language, and bookbinding itself, is the only way we know how to protect that heritage.”

Before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World, the ancient Tzotzil Maya from the Chiapas region—the Woodlanders’ ancestors—were revered as the empire’s most talented bookmakers. Using plant dyes as ink and tree bark for paper, they created the Maya codices—sacred, hand-painted books that document celestial movements, spells, divinations, and ceremonial sacrifices to gods.

In the 16th century, the Spanish burned every Maya library across Mexico, calling the codices “nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the Devil.” Today, only four original codices remain (three of them are stored in museum vaults in Europe). That has left this precious bookbinding tradition—not to mention the stories and histories between codice covers—forgotten by much of the Mexican population.

[xiphosuras]

The second one, I was afraid the details would be too small and clog up with ink but they actually transferred perfectly. Again, the scan will come soon!

[woodlanders]

The charming blue of Peyto Lake