Woodland Plants, Sellers Wood
Now that the weather’s cleared up, yesterday evening I headed outside for a woodland walk. Quite an interesting time of year, with not only the woodland poster boy – Bluebells – out in full, but stacks more interesting species: Early Purple Orchid, Greater Stitchwort (the name comes from when it was used to treat stitch), Wood Anemone. Hawthorn trees were starting to blossom, too.
Bruichladdich Renaissance Feis Ile 2011
I go on about Bruichladdich often enough to bore regular readers of the blog. Suffice to say: I reckon they’re the best distillery in Scotland bar none. They’d achieve huge respect for the whisky alone – generally speaking, wonderful artisan drams – but it’s their attitude to the industry (which is more of a cartel, largely dominated by conglomerates) as well as the environment and the land, which marks them out as a truly wonderful business. This stuff matters.
But what about the Bruichladdich Renaissance Feis Ile 2011? It was distilled in 1998, aged in bourbon casks and bottled at 46% for the 2011 Feis Ile, the Islay Festival (one day, I will make it to Islay). There were only 2,500 of these made, so there aren’t many around. Hopefully it would stand up to the rest of their range.
Colour: rather pale straw-coloured liquid, diluted apple juice. On the nose: very familiar Laddie aroma on this. Rich, butterscotch, spicy and oaky. A whiff of citrus in the distance.
In the mouth: they’ve done it again. There’s a fullness, oiliness and such a lovely weight in the mouth. It’s the first thing you notice – it just sits there on your tongue. Is it the shape of the stills that does this, as it’s consistently brilliant. Then: the warming maltiness comes through. Chunks of ginger in syrup, almost bourbon-like in that sweetness, but with far more depth. A bold okay-rich finish that goes on for ages. It’s certainly up there with the finest of their range, for what it’s worth.
A bottle of the Renaissance Feis Ile 2011 will set you back almost £100, but you can get samples from Master of Malt for a fraction of that.
Or you can just buy just about anything else from Bruichladdich and be happy.
Arts & Crafts Book Cover Design
Being a fan of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement (and for his pioneering science fiction, environmentalism and politics as much as his artistic influence), this exhibition sounds rather interesting: From Rossetti to Voysey: Arts & Crafts Stamped Cloth Book Cover Design, at Blackwell in Cumbria.
The exhibition brings together books with case-bound cloth covers by well known artists and designers, published between 1866 and 1911 and issued by commercial publishers. The featured designers read like a roll-call of the leading names of the day, including: DG Rossetti, William Morris, Philip Webb, Charles Ricketts, Walter Crane, Laurence Housman and Gleeson White.
The covers have been selected on the grounds of their style and for the proximity of their designers to the core of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Most of those included had work shown at the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society; four of the designers were Masters of the Art Workers Guild.
Jonah
Jonah is a forthcoming animated film from Kibwe Tavares @ Factory Fifteen, who made the incredible Robots of Brixton (basically, a short film that genre fandom should really be paying attention to, instead of the usual suspects). The above teaser artwork has just been released. What’s it about?
Jonah is a story set in the fishing town of Zanzibar of a changing man in a changing town. Aggressive tourism sparked through Jonah’s discovery of the world biggest fish has caused the town and himself to change beyond recognition. The town is now a glowing, tacky, money making, wildly opportunistic beach town, which has abandoned its original fishing roots. As an old man Jonah is ashamed of what his old fishing town has become and decides to hunt down the legendary fish and kill it, killing what it represents.
Jonah is being made in partnership with Film4, BFI, Channel4, Shine Films.
More over on the Factory Fifteen website.
Bushmills Aged 16 Years
I’m not a big drinker of Irish whiskey. There’s no particular reason for this, but I guess I tend to consciously aim for drams from Scotland or Japan; and personally I rate these the top two countries in the world for whiskies. (Note that Irish and American whiskey ends with ‘ey’ – the rest of the world spells it ‘whisky’.)
So, onto the Bushmills Aged 16 Years single malt Irish whiskey, from Old Bushmills, a distillery in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, and which has been churning out liquid since 1608, making it the oldest licenced distillery in the world.
The 16 year old has been been matured in three different wood casks: bourbon, Oloroso sherry and then finally in port. As with many Irish single malt whiskies, it’s been triple-distilled (most Scottish whiskies are double-distilled, with the exception of the Bruichladdich X4+3, which has been distilled four times).
Colour: on the darker side of whiskies, almost like a dark rum, with a rose-coloured tint to it – probably coming from the port casks. On the nose: there are overwhelming sherry notes at first, but it falls back to lovely dried fruits, sultanas, grape juice, all with a lovely, buttery edge.
In the mouth: it’s incredibly smooth and with a lovely weight. Creamy. Those expected dried fruits come through in the taste, perhaps predictably so. It fades leaving an interesting malty tang, which goes just as quickly as it came. Sherry, of course, and a warming, tannin-like edge. A bitter chocolate kick just to finish off.
It’s a lovely dram, not as sophisticated as it could have been, but certainly one of those nice social drams. If you can find a bottle, it’s priced somewhere between £40 and £60.
Vincent Segal & Ballaké Sissoko
Something a little different; and beautiful, if you like this kind of thing. I’ve recently been listening to their album, Chamber Music, which is remarkable. In case you were wondering, the strange-looking instrument is a Kora.
Skip to around 2:30 if you want to get past the preamble and straight to the music. Why are there no cafés like this where I live?
John Updike on Criticism
From the introduction of his 1977 book Picked-up Pieces, John Updike offers six rules on good reviewing (which, unfortunately assume the author is male):
My rules, drawn up inwardly when l embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio- fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:
- Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
Whether or not it’s a good or bad trend (and being an author I’m bound to mention this point), I suspect too few reviewers of science fiction and fantasy fiction really seem to put much effort into point 1. Perhaps that’s because genre critics are fascinated with taxonomy and heritage, and end up trying to compare the book to others, rather than examining it in isolation. Maybe that’s just the nature of genre, though.
(Via Brainpickings.)