Environmental Geography: May 2025

Browsing Netflix offerings recently, we noticed a limited series called Sirens. The title alone lured us in (as it were), since I am an honorary member of a whaleboat rowing team called the Sirenes. Honorary member means that I often fill in as a substitute on this all-women's team so that they have a full boat. Sometimes I even get to race with them.

In any case, the title and vaguely nautical vibes were enough to get us watching. It was a vague echo of the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Perfect Couple, a 2024 Netflix production that was set on Nantucket. Although we have not been there recently, this is a favorite haunt of ours, the only place in the United States that is an island, a county, and a town.

This show that clearly intended to depict Nantucket, Characters came and went by ferry. One of them had a 17-hour trip from Buffalo. There were a lot of rich, white people and gray houses with white trim. A cute little downtown with big mansions a short drive away. Eventually, a neighborhood and a gulf course on Nantucket were named. But the writers and directors worked very hard not to mention it directly.

We were well into the series when Pam's keen eye caught a sign on the side of shop in said cute little town (creatively dubbed Harbor Town), and on the sign was carved its purported latitude and longitude.

I took this photo of the screen -- both because the image was fleeting and the resolution low -- and went right to Google Maps. Incidentally, I was glad to see the degree-minutes-seconds format, which said Google Maps is making increasingly rare, and I note that even if correct, it is far more precise than accurate. By that I mean that four decimal places in the expression of a second of latitude or longitude equates to about 1/8 of an inch, which is smaller than the decimal point in use.

Anyway, enough of the suspense. These coordinates are a bit out to sea, almost as far from Nantucket as the island is wide. But it is clearly the nearest landmass, so the carving was clearly intentional.

We are reminded of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the latitude and longitude of Grover's Corners describes a point in the Atlantic close to New Hampshire but not in any real state.

As for the filming location of Sirens, IMDb indicates that it is North Fork, New York. That is, the North Fork of the eastern end of Long Island. It has a cultural geography and vernacular landscape similar to Nantucket. The physical landscape is also similar, given that both are terminal moraines formed by side by side at the end of the last ice age and later surrounded by rising ocean as the glaciers that formed them continued to melt.

The World Book Club is one of my favorite BBC programs. Or should I write programmes?

Harriett Gilbert: A third-generation writer who does her research!

Its entire two decades of episodes are now available as a podcast, and I find myself listening frequently. Because I am prone to fumbling my podcast app, I often hear an episode several times, and I do not mind at all. I have read only a small fraction of the books under discussion, but I find that presenter Harriett Gilbert leads an entertaining and profoundly educational discussion with every participating author. I will enjoy an episode even if I have heard it recently.

The World Book Club is appropriately named. Each month a book is selected and announced so that readers have a chance to read the book and send in questions. The author then meets with the presenter and invited guests in person, usually at BBC's Bush House in London. The author is then introduced, always taking note of awards won and the number of languages into which their work has been translated.

Gilbert and her team then curate questions from the live audience, from emailed questions, and from phone calls, along with her own questions that arise from her expert reading of the work. I use the term "curate" because the questions tend to follow a very helpful pattern, with general questions that might be asked of any writer near the beginning, followed by increasingly detailed and sophisticated questions that would arise only from a careful reading.

Gilbert graciously acknowledges each question, sometimes adding an expert edit as she repeats it, and always acknowledging mentioning where the caller or writer is from. And because she is a BBC journalist, she always pronounces names of both people and places correctly! In any given discussion, it is likely that people from at least three continents will have participated.

The list below is from all of the episodes for which I could readily connect the author to the African continent. Most of these are novels set somewhere in Africa and written by African authors. I have listed only one country as a kind of shorthand -- listen to the episodes to learn that many of these authors call several countries home and that many of the books are set in multiple places -- or in some cases fictional countries. Moreover, as is often the case, these episodes have a focus on one book, but with some authors a broader body of work enters th conversation.

Each entry below includes a link to a BBC page and/or a Spotify page as available. I also include dates of each author's life and each novel's publication.

February 2002 - Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Hove (1956 - 2015) Ancestors (1997)
(Spotify)
This is just the third episode of World Book Club -- the interest in Africa comes early in this series. It is just a conversation between the author and the host -- there were no questions from audience yet.

December 2002 - Nigeria

Monday, May 26, 2025

Wherefore the Sirens?

Monday, May 19, 2025

Africa Book Club