(Click the CC button for English subtitles).
Big thanks to Biblioklept reader (and frequent commenter) ccllyyddee, who sent me his copy of Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice. I dipped into it a bit this weekend; Ehrlich seems to be walking that strange line between the physical and metaphysical. A description from her website–
In this gripping circumnavigation of the Arctic Circle, Gretel Ehrlich paints a vivid portrait of the indigenous cultures that inhabit the starkly beautiful boreal landscape surrounding the Arctic Ocean, an ice-bound wilderness that includes northern Siberia, northwestern Greenland, Canada’s vast Nunavut, and northern Alaska. Ehrlich’s expedition, supported by the National Geographic Society, documents what remains of these cultures, specifically the similarities and differences among them, including hunting traditions, shamanic and ceremonial practices, languages and legends—the ways in which they have survived, or have been assimilated, and how they are adapting to the impact of climate change on their ice-age cultures.
Ehrlich is fascinated by what she calls the ecology of culture—the ways in which the human presence of indigenous Arctic people is intricately interwoven with land, rock, river, sea, and ice. Depicting human-caused climate change as only the latest and most destructive of the ills and abuses first peoples have been suffering for 250 years, Ehrlich’s haunting and lovely prose portrays ancient tribes and traditions on the edge of extinction and captures the austere beauty of their various lifeways in the frozen dreamscape of the world they have always known.
More from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magical Notebooks—
143 Days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory.
144 Dyed Siberian horse.
145 As thin as a repeated dream.
146 The sea was coming up in little intimidating rushes.
147 The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.
148 Lost in the immensity of surfaceless blue sky like air piled on air.
151 On the great swell of the Blue Danube, the summer ball rocked into motion.
152 A circus ring for ponies in country houses.
153 The tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.
154 A rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 80’s, the country poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again.
155 The groans of moribund plumbing.
156 The silvery “Hey!” of a telephone.
161 Whining, tinkling hoochie-coochie show.
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