Treeshagging

[catalog]

Making a bit more headway with Suzanne Simard's book now. It's still a bit weird, in terms of how she writes. She kind of skirts around lots of biographical details so you end up wondering what's going on. Quite an awkward writer.

But she's now talking about some of her first proper research and it's getting interesting.

Specifically how she proved through loads of tests that a common forestry practice was not working in the way people supposed.

The forest companies were clearing smaller "understory" plants, shrubs and trees, like alders, in order to promote "free" growth of cash trees like pines.

But she showed that whilst this had an early positive effect, cos the smaller plants were talking water off the pines, over time the ones with other plants around them did better, cos they got nitrogen from them.

Im now at the part where she's presenting her findings to a very corporate male audience and they are losing their minds with her, cos of all the money tied up in fertilisers.

 

[catalog]

From New Juche's very good book "Moutainhead" published 2017 by nine banded books.

I sleep for hours, waking after a melancholic dream. In the dream, my penis had grown into a tree, each vein and lump sprouting and growing into branches and boughs from which leaves blossom, and I pick the leaves at random and see the shapes I love written on them.

interview with author:

The Hoover Hog

A Review of Dangerous Ideas

hooverhog.typepad.com

 

[catalog]

Was painting walls today and when you put white emulsion on stippled wallpaper it leaves a very satisfying xylemy slick trail which then evaporates in front of your eyes.

 

[Version]

Bernie Krause on the Healing Powers of Quietude, the Ba’Aka tribe, and Japanese Forest Bathing

 

[william kent]

"Not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is
in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of
beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who
ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into
his body... "

-- D&G, Anti-Oedipus

 

[catalog]

Was thinking last night about how this idea of how if you go and stand by a living tree it gives off these chemicals that are supposedly good for you and this continues even when the tree is dead, as long as it's not been sealed by varnish and then how there's this trend towards wooden speaker boxes again now, so you've got the wood and the bass both there

 

[Murphy]

Ever been to the National Forest? Bit of a joke really

It’s more like a wood, winnowed out, all higgledy-piggledy



It’s Nottingham tree snobbery, boiled down. Bloody motorway runs through it, but there’s a paucity actual fuckin trees. Sherwood is more like a park these days, no matter what Forest evokes as a myth or image

 

[luka]

The Amazon will look like that by the end of the decade

 

[Version]

Ever been to the National Forest? Bit of a joke really

It’s more like a wood, winnowed out, all higgledy-piggledy

Angela Carter had some things to say regarding English woods versus European forests..

The English wood is nothing like the dark, necromantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live, and Baba-yaga stalks about in her house with chicken's feet looking for children in order to eat them. No. There is a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference between this wood and that forest. The difference does not exist just because a wood contains fewer trees than a forest and covers less ground. That is just one of the causes of the difference and does not explain the effect of the difference.

For example, an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, cannot, by definition, be trackless, although it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you cannot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a construct of the human mind, and not unlike it; lost in the wood, this analogy will always console. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found, to be committed against your will - or, worse, of your own desire - to a perpetual absence from humanity, an existential catastrophe, for the forest is as infinitely boundless as the human heart.

But the wood is finite, a closure; you purposely mislay your way in the wood, for the sake of the pleasure of roving, the temporary confusion of direction is in the nature of a holiday from which you will come home refreshed, with your pockets fulll of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is haunted; this wood is enchanted.

Angel Carter - Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

[luka]

the whole point about wilderness is that it can kill you and obviously England has no wilderness whatsoever. Model train set country.

 

[Murphy]

Clearly Paulie and Christopher never read Angela Carter before entering the pine barrens

Britain’s forest is the sea

 

[catalog]

but nottingham does have some massive trees and i love it how they are uprooting the pavements.

 

[william kent]

There was some guy on Reddit who wrote a bunch of stuff from the perspective of a park ranger about people being lost in the wilderness, bodies being found impossibly high up in trees, staircases appearing in the middle of forests. As far as I know, it's all fiction, but I got completely sucked in and spent an evening reading the lot.

The thing about the stairs was really unnerving,

"This is the last one I'll tell, and it's probably the weirdest story I have. Now, I don't know if this is true in every SAR unit, but in mine, it's sort of an unspoken, regular thing we run into. You can try asking about it with other SAR officers, but even if they know what you're talking about, they probably won't say anything about it. We've been told not to talk about it by our superiors, and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore. On just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness, I'm talking 30 or 40 miles, at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods. It's almost like if you took the stairs in your house, cut them out, and put them in the forest. I asked about it the first time I saw some, and the other officer just told me not to worry about it, that it was normal. Everyone I asked said the same thing. I wanted to go check them out, but I was told, very emphatically, that I should never go near any of them. I just sort of ignore them now when I run into them because it happens so frequently."

 

[Murphy]

@catalog Aye, they can fuckbuckle a bike wheel up. We have a couple of decent boulevards, the arboretum is chilled yet you only have to push out a tad and even the hedgerows have been removed from surrounding farmland. The area around the power station is grotesque, borderline prairie, with fields of rapeseed all the way down the M1. Northants is the opposite (apart from Corby’s warehouse hellscape)

Council does its best (progressive for Britain), not that a tram can ever really counter the march of the car. Mansfield Rd during rush hour is a carcinogenic smog zone, all the main routes are. Derby Rd, Alfreton Rd, all the routes out to Trent Bridge or NW heading back to the motorway. One of the worst regions in Britain for asthma clusters

 

[luka]

The stairs are real

 

[Murphy]

There was some guy on Reddit who wrote a bunch of stuff from the perspective of a park ranger about people being lost in the wilderness, bodies being found impossibly high up in trees, staircases appearing in the middle of forests. As far as I know, it's all fiction, but I got completely sucked in and spent an evening reading the lot.

The thing about the stairs was really unnerving,

"This is the last one I'll tell, and it's probably the weirdest story I have. Now, I don't know if this is true in every SAR unit, but in mine, it's sort of an unspoken, regular thing we run into. You can try asking about it with other SAR officers, but even if they know what you're talking about, they probably won't say anything about it. We've been told not to talk about it by our superiors, and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore. On just about every case where we're really far into the wilderness, I'm talking 30 or 40 miles, at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods. It's almost like if you took the stairs in your house, cut them out, and put them in the forest. I asked about it the first time I saw some, and the other officer just told me not to worry about it, that it was normal. Everyone I asked said the same thing. I wanted to go check them out, but I was told, very emphatically, that I should never go near any of them. I just sort of ignore them now when I run into them because it happens so frequently."

wtf

trying to mop up urine, now I’m down a tree horror wormhole too (the latter in a good way)

 

[william kent]

There's a really creepy one about them looking for a little girl, hearing her crying in the woods then suddenly realising the crying's looped.

 

[Murphy]

 

[william kent]

There's something terrifying about a torch or spotlight in the woods. Lynch does it in Twin Peaks and Adam Curtis has some night vision footage like that at the start of Hypernormalisation. You're just waiting for the light to land on something horrifying,

 

[william kent]