书评约稿

面对新媒体的滚滚洪流，传统媒体人在颤抖。我关注了一些书评微信公众号，内容几乎已经做到了极致，但阅读数很可怜：《经济观察报书评周刊》，4月23日发布梁文道《我的私人阅读史》，阅读数14190，《线上访谈：葛剑雄的近忧与远虑》，阅读数3360。 我打算仿造国外媒体上我喜欢的两三个读书栏目。 首先是经济学人的副刊Intelligent Life，有个栏目叫Notes on a Voice: the style of 某某，如Tom Stoppard 最新一期是Notes on a Voice: Saul Bellow on his centenary，http://moreintelligentlife.com/contents-may-june-2015 卫报的一个栏目，Digested read 华尔街日报的一个栏目，Five Best: Sally McMillen The author of ‘Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life’ recommends biographies of notable first ladies. 2 Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane – digested read http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/15/landmarks-robert-macfarlane-digested-read John Crace reduces the latest peregrinations from the landscape writer to a panoramic 600 words As I set out alone from my highland bothy one late autumn morning, a mis-shapen mist hovered above a petrified landscape. I was seized with a terror of the terroir. I lengthened my stride, ungulating wildly as a lonely gull ululated o’er a distant crag. Not only was I in danger of losing so many words, both eldritch and protean, to describe our pre-post-pastoral landscape, I was close to dropping the copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems that had been my constant companion and solace on every journey to Sainsbury’s Local these past 2,000 years or more. In that moment of near perfect recall – described so vividly in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, a narrative that serves as a portal to the propositionally structured – I resolved to preserve our ancient ways. Stream: a small river possessed of its own consciousness. Macfarlish: the process of praising other authors to make your own book better by association. What did I see that morning? A hot winter sun, felt as red but seen as gold. But what did I really see that morning? As Richard Jefferies wrote in Nature Near London, a slim volume published in 1883 that he dedicated to me, the more we know something, the more uncertain it becomes. Faced with the possibility of my own brilliance receding from me, I set out on yet another pointless journey to try to find something to describe rather well. Dressed in shepherd’s garb and a-walking with a shepherd’s gait, I was reading the Finnish folk epic, The Kalevala, while in search of the source of the Holloway Road. I was fortunate to be joined for some of the way by John Clare, the greatest of all nature writers apart from me. “Pray, John,” I enquired of him. “What would you say is the precise word for the particular type of cold I am experiencing today? Peart or pinjy?” “You know what, Bob?” he replied. “You really ought to get out more.” Sprinter: the time between spring and winter that in Cornwall often seems to rush past. Mon-biot: the early morning tweet of the excitable green finch that would have been better off deleted. Water. Sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, yet always wet. As I was rereading one of my own books, I recalled the pleasure I had taken from swimming along the Cam with Roger Deakin while discussing the possibility of metempsychosis into the otherness of mermaid. I will never forget the first letter I wrote to him. “Dear Roger, Thank you for transporting me out of my bunker-office in Cambridge to the walnut woods of Kyrgyzstan.” After he died, I found it nestling on the top of his most precious personal effects. On it, he had scrawled: “It was Kazakhstan, you idiot.” Shizzlebagge: a once common term that registered the profound relationship between dog and pavement, denoting the practice whereby, according to local legend (the tradition has all but died out), the streets, lanes , paths and Islington “wynds”, would be kept free of excrement. Advertisement Aaaaaagh: the sound that fossilised ammonites make upon being broken open with a hammer; only audible to the most sensitive of Dorset souls. Reacquainting myself once more with the odd rhymes and elective affinities of Jacquetta Hawkes’s A Land – her chthonic cretaceous collective cosmi-comedy – I resolved to escape her disciplinary waywardness and head northwards. By nature, I am north-minded. By which, I mean I do not like to face south. I refer you here to the duct, an optical phenomenon of thermal inversion that allows the most refined writers to see beyond the earth’s curvature. Should a writer, such as myself, be so blessed, his gaze can circumnavigate the earth thus negating the need to ever face in a southerly direction. Grouse: the collective noun for a gathering of nature-writers moaning about Helen Macdonald winning so many awards. Landmarks: something of great importance that is actually quite dull. Digested read, digested: N is for Nature.