#james rebanks

[e-b-reads]

This landscape is our home and we rarely stray far from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don't care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.

- The Shepherd's Life, James Rebanks

[bshocommons]

A prudent gambler would not bet his house on our virtue, because the odds say we will fail. There are a million reasons to believe that we are not big enough, brave enough, or wise enough to do anything so grand and idealistic as stop the damage we are doing.

James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

[jonathanjudge]

[irishmansdaughter]

Herdwick Sheep after shearing, Matterdale, Lake District, Cumbria, England

by James Rebanks

[justforbooks]

In 2015 James Rebanks published the bestselling The Shepherd’s Life, a seasonal account of a year in the life of a small-scale sheep farmer in Cumbria. He wanted, he said, to put “the working-class nobodies – our people – back into the books”. In one of the most unforgettable sections, he recalls the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease that ravaged the UK in 2001. A “contiguous cull” required all sheep within three kilometres of a known outbreak to be slaughtered. Rebanks watched as the animals he had bred and raised were shot, one after the other. “When the last wagon had gone, I went into the barn … sat down in the shadows, held my head in my hands and sobbed.”

Foot-and-mouth devastated Cumbria, wiping out the livestock and livelihoods of nearly 900 farms. That devastation sits at the heart of The Borrowed Hills, Scott Preston’s blistering debut novel. Preston was a boy when the epidemic hit. Like Rebanks, he grew up in the Lake District, where his father was a dry stone waller. He too was frustrated that nothing he read told the story of the land and the people he grew up with in a way he recognised. The Borrowed Hills is an explosive bid to right that wrong.

Steve Elliman is the son of a tenant farmer in a fictional fold of the fells called Curdale Valley. When his father falls ill he chucks in his job as a lorry driver and goes home to help. The smallholding is “scarce a thumbprint” on the valley and rapidly falling into disrepair. Their flock of just 200 sheep live wild on the open fells 1,000 feet up, “higher than where the flycatchers and doves roosted in cragfolds, and higher than where falcons nested watching their dinner below”. When rumours of foot-and-mouth start to spread, Steve isolates the sheep but he cannot save them. The sickness has taken hold at a neighbouring farm and orders are clear. Every animal must be eliminated.

The massacre that follows is unsparing in its matter-of-fact violence. Steve’s first-person narrative is written in his distinctive Cumbrian voice, a vernacular stripped to its bones that encompasses stark prose and sudden startling flashes of poetry. Rifle muzzles are “placed between [the sheep’s] ears and the bullets lined along their backs so each bang stayed inside their heads”. The sheep panic. The squaddies sent to dispatch them panic in their turn. The result is half Tarantino and half pitch-black northern realism, an absurdist horror that slides under the skin and lodges deep.

Later Steve fetches up on his neighbour William Herne’s farm, where the outbreak is rumoured to have started. The sheep that William tried to hide out in the fells have been seen from a police helicopter and gunned down from the sky. The fires incinerating the dead animals burn day and night for a week. “We had burned through everything, even what we’d no right to, rubbed out the stars and hid the moon, and if the night sky wasn’t already black we’d have had a good go at making it.” When the job is finished Steve leaves the valley and goes back to driving lorries, but something in him has changed. He can’t stay away. When he finally returns, William has a plan to get back on his feet, a plan that will push both men into a spiralling nightmare of violence and bloodshed.

Despite the wild beauty of the landscape, there is something claustrophobic about Preston’s novel: the tyranny of a place that demands relentless back-breaking labour and will never pay back what is given. Steve and William’s increasingly feverish venture is not a quest for new frontiers but a frantic struggle to claw back a life that was already falling apart. “That’s what I like about you farm lads,” a man tells Steve. “Know what it is to raise something to be killed.” But like the slaughter of foot-and-mouth, the violence that enmeshes the two men is not heroic. It is ugly and senseless and it destroys lives. It offers no redemption. The best one can hope for is the restoration of a precarious equilibrium, a return to the harsh hardscrabble of before.

This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[postoctobrist]

Do you take Left on Read suggestions? If so, English Pastoral by James Rebanks is a really beautiful little book about farming and how it's changed over the past sixty years, with all the social and ecological implications

duly noted, thanks!

[rattlinbog]

Books Read in 2022

January

The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit by Patricia Monaghan 

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine 

February

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher

The Desolations of Devil’s Acre (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #6) by Ransom Riggs 

Eifelhelm by Michael Flynn 

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer 

March

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (reread)

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley

April

The Parted Earth by Anjani Enjeti 

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar 

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy 

The Last Blue by Isla Morley 

Lone Stars by Justin Deabler 

All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burns

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

May

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (reread)

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker 

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

A History of Native American Land Rights in Upstate New York by Cindy Amrhein 

June

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman

These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Dubois 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez 

A Marvelous Light by Freya Marske 

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

July

No Exit by Taylor Adams

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey 

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

Calypso by David Sedaris

My Antonia by Willa Cather 

The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 by Elizabeth Howe

English Animals by Laura Kaye

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

August

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang 

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (reread)

The Latecomers by Helen Klein Ross 

Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

September

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak 

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music by Douglas B. Green

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream by Conor Dougherty

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson (reread)

J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank

October

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

The Reddening by Adam Nevill

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

November

It Happened in the Smokies... A Mountaineer’s Memories of Happenings in the Smoky Mountains in Pre-Park Days by Gladys Trentham Russell

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks 

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres 

I Was Told There’d be Cake: Essays by Sloane Crosley

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

December

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (reread)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (reread)

Mrs. Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

[martha-anne]

My 2022 list of books really worth reading (according to me)

In no particular order:

A Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

Emma by Jane Austen

Daybook, the Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elizabeth Tova Bailey

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

The Trees by Percival Everett

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Dr Anil Seth

On the Line: Notes from a Factory by Joseph Ponthus

Of these, almost half are non fiction. I'm surprised by this as I generally read a lot more fiction than non-fiction. Here’s to many more great books next year ⭐️

[shaya-bookreviews]

The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks 5/5

I really really liked. It's a memoir about growing up in a different world than mine, aka my favorite kind of book. I loveeeeee how it goes deep into themes like tourism vs locals, the value of "boring" farmer work, and the beauty of preserving ancestral work. Love love love. I hope I can read this again one day. I hope Jacob likes it.

Themes: family. Tragedy of the commons, farming, sheep, community, work, nature

[e-b-reads]

...every conversation for the next three years was about how it must be a big change being in Oxford after working on the fells each day. I had a good evening talking to [a professor] and at the end he said, 'Oh well, I imagine you will miss it.' I told him that I hadn't stopped doing it, that I was going back. He seemed quite confused by this.

- The Shepherd's Life, James Rebanks

[coffeewineautumn]

Word of the Week 8/3/2024 Reading #WotW

I love to read but I don’t always have or make the time to do so. This week I seem to have caught the bug again because I’ve ploughed (pun intended) through two books by James Rebanks better known on Twitter as the Herdwick Shepherd and am halfway into a third. His wife Helen Rebanks has also written a book which I highly recommend. I don’t live on a farm, know nothing about sheep but these…

[bshocommons]

The idea that land must be either perfectly wild or perfectly efficient and sterile is unwise and blinding; it is a false and unsustainable simplification.

James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

[dailysmalljobs]

Was Yoda a medieval monk? It takes a museum curator to tell you. Guardian Careers

New Post has been published on https://dailysmalljobs.com/was-yoda-a-medieval-monk-it-takes-a-museum-curator-to-tell-you-guardian-careers/

Was Yoda a medieval monk? It takes a museum curator to tell you. Guardian Careers

uUntil the advent of social media, being a curator at the British Library was a lonely, outside job. In many ways it still is for Julian Harrison, curator of pre-1600 historical manuscripts. Behind the scenes he cares for priceless collections that include copies of Beowulf, some of the world’s oldest Bibles, the Lindisfarne Gospels and Henry VIII’s state papers. He currently curates exhibitions such as Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy The difference for Harrison these days is that he does it all with a virtual audience of thousands.

Harrison has worked at the British Library since 2006 “I can’t imagine how we could communicate what we do without the occasional story in the media,” he says The transition began in 2010 when the library started an experimental blog to chart the digitization of Greek manuscripts. “It was a special thing for a special audience,” he added.

This pilot project was developed at the British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog, a vivid and illuminating account of the curator’s life. “We use it to promote what we do,” Harrison said. “A popular post explains why we don’t wear white gloves when handling manuscripts, but we also strive for a non-academic readership. Our most popular post is Knight vs Snail which shows why images of armed knights fighting snails are common in illuminated manuscripts.”

These images have proved very popular online. “People often don’t realize how beautiful illuminated manuscripts are and how technically proficient they were in the Middle Ages,” he says. Then there are pictures with a comic twist. One of Harrison’s posts is entitled Lolcats of the Middle Ages, another features a doodle figure, curiously looking like Yoda from Star Wars. The images appeal to the same online audience, Harrison noted, that enjoys watching cats play the piano on YouTube.

When Harrison took over the Medieval Manuscripts blog it had two hit readers a day. Now its record daily traffic stands at 36,000. A supports this Twitter account With 23,400 followers, and it’s clear that rather than doing a quiet, hidden job, his daily life as a curator is being presented in a new, exciting way.

“We’ve got an incredibly international readership,” Harrison said. “We have visitors in every country you can think of with the exception of Antarctica, Greenland and North Korea. We get a lot of inquiries from people who want to do the same thing as us. Many young aspiring curators. social media Certainly the dynamic has changed.

Harrison talks about the enriching effect of social media; How it allows many people a peek into a world that was previously hidden from them. And just as Harrison found an audience by chronicling the life of a curator, James Rebanks, a shepherd charting his work at Lakeland Falls, attracted a formidable social media following with daily tweets.

Rebanks has built a social media following, tweeting about his work as a shepherd. Photo: PR

Rebanks tells me he’s long wanted to write about his work as a shepherd, a job still guided by the ancient rhythms of the annual calendar. There are spring, summer lambs as he sends his flock to fall, autumn fair and winter darkness. His life is closely tied to the landscape. “It wasn’t until 1998 or 1999 that I wrote for the magazine that we [shepherds] did,” he says, “but the Twitter part was completely accidental. It started when some friends encouraged me to tweet about the farm.

He wrote his first tweet on 18 January 2012, An image of his flock in fawn green falls under a dark winter sky, it set the tone for what followed. Beautiful pictures of sheep herding through skinny northern lanes, playful shots of his college at work, snippets of rural wisdom and insight. “I was nervous,” Rebanks says. “I started anonymously and didn’t appear at all in my first 13,000 tweets There are many shy and modest people in the society. I never post pictures of people I don’t approve of.”

But soon Rebanks was attracting a following, a Twitter swarm of her own that numbered in the tens, then hundreds, and then thousands. “It took a while to get to 700 followers,” he recalls. “Then it doubled in 2014 and now it’s really taken off.”

Today Rebanks has 57,000 followers on Twitter who travel with him to the falls and back to the market. Last month she tweeted about the birth of 10 sheepdogs, Posting a video clip to Vine That has been viewed 780,000 times. All this attention has propelled him into the mainstream. His first book this month, shepherd lifePublished by Penguin. It is currently being read as a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4.

“The reason I’m doing this is because I think we’re the forgotten people in the landscape. The Lake District is the chocolate box, the picture postcard. People forget us. What I’m really doing on Twitter is ‘we’re still here’,” Rebanks said. is about an infectious enthusiasm about what you love and sharing it with other people.”

Like Harrison, Rebanks’ success lies in opening windows into hidden worlds, an enduring attraction of social media. This is something that novelist Clare King also tried to achieve. He had not previously documented his writing life but decided to Start a blog While he was working on what would be his first novel, rainbow at night,

Her posts chart the writing process, practical tips on the novelist’s craft, and her experiences in the publishing industry. “I didn’t really expect people to listen to me because there are so many writing blogs out there,” she explains. “But it was a way to publicly state my intentions and therefore hold myself accountable.”

This regular, well-crafted mediation by a working novelist found a like-minded, engaged audience on Twitter. Raja lifts the lid on an industry that many want to break into, but has long been considered mysterious and exclusive to outsiders. Have any of his readers or followers gone on to get their own publishing deals?

“Yes, many have and I am always happy to hear and share their good news. We all need a little cheerleading in this world,” she says.

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#Yoda #medieval #monk #takes #museum #curator #Guardian #Careers

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.

James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

[marcherren]

More pleasures of... November

[rattlinbog]

Favorite books of 2022

I don’t really feel like making a cute post with pictures this time but here are some of the books I especially enjoyed last year

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer 

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser 

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn 

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy 

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett 

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker 

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang 

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow 

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey 

Calypso by David Sedaris 

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang 

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd 

J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin 

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates 

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks 

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin 

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz 

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice