Author Archives: eflaherty

#CLOY

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Iseltwald???
Iseltwald!

Released in 2019, the popular Netflix series “Crash Landing on You” is about a paragliding mishap dropping a South Korean heiress into North Korea — and into the life of a North Korean army officer, who decides he will help her.

This is a love story that overcomes the hardships of world politics–what is there not to like??

After incredible political complications, they separate due to those hardships; but they have already given their hearts to each other. And through the tricks of screen writing they reunite, in the tear-jerker of all time, on the dock in Iseltwald.

Meanwhile, the 400 residents of Iseltwald, a quiet Swiss village on Lake Brienz, rarely visited by tourists, have, most recently, seen hundreds of thousands of #CLOY visitors from Korea and East Asia. Quiet village? No longer.

What do you think about that?

Me? What do I think? Human emotions and their links to the landscape–mysterious, diaphanous, beautiful, arcane–they are the stuff of my books, like Tangier Gardens, link–https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv

Links:
The movie–https://www.netflix.com/ch-en/title/81159258
Swiss newspaper–https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/fans-of-netflix-series-disrupt-peaceful-swiss-village/47851764

“Magical Realism”

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I could never get “magical realism” until I spent too many years around the Rub al Khali–the Empty Quarter.

Then I met CJ. He was obsessed. About? I couldn’t figure it out–magical realism or the Empty Quarter.

He wrote: “How to beat, tame, survive–the Empty Quarter–life–magical realism?

Only by imagination.”

CJ tried…and got beat.

It all started in Morocco, Tangier Gardens, then KSA, Egypt and finally, the Empty Quarter.

Landscape and CJ

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20,000 feet or on the ground…

Where are the plants?
Where are the plants?

In Tangier Gardens, CJ learns about landscapes, gardens and plants. Landscapes are mysterious because they harbor weirdness as he learned from Bree and he sensed from his West Africa experiences.

In Yenbo Palms, CJ once again gets wind of unusual things in the landscape, this time in the deserts of Arabia.

These stories are not for, or about tourists. They are about the expatriate who never dreamt of leaving home. They are about a person who is, like most of us, inspired by the beautiful and endlessly varied landscape. 

He loved landscape so much he studied it in college and earned a degree in landscape architecture. But what he learned in school didn’t prepare him for the expatriate landscapes that perplexed him. Arcane landscapes? Could there be such a thing?

CJ chases nature, its landscape and plants to their existential roots. He describes his interactions with cultures, landscapes, gardens and plants of the world—where the unexpected and downright strange become daily facts of life.

Tangier Gardens, buy it now on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv

Dichotomy?

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CJ studied fine arts for his first two years at college. In music, literature and painting he found an enigmatic similarity. Many composers, authors and painters were inspired by nature, either the outdoors or human nature. That was clear.

It was, however, the dichotomy of the critics that confused him. 

The critics’ perplexing dichotomy pitted human social nature vs the natural world, nature without humans. He wondered why the dichotomy? Were not humans part of the nature in which we all lived? Even though humans were at the top of the food chain we were still part of the chain. How can behavior, intelligence or spirit separate humans from the nature all around us?

And why have so many sought to make that ‘false’ distinction?

CJ’s own battles with this dichotomy got serious when, after deciding to major in landscape architecture, he went to North Africa, for his term abroad design study.

There he met a couple esoteric horticulturists, one Russian and the other British. They had built and were guardians of an arcane garden, the Oval Garden, behind their Hibiscus House. There they tried to educate CJ–solve his enigmatic fine arts, landscape and garden concerns.

Read about it in Tangier Gardens on Amazon. Buy a copy.

Nature and Landscape?

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Nature and landscape… CJ asked himself what was the difference? Nature ? Is it larger than landscape? He finally decided that landscape was limited by his eyesight. And nature was larger–conceptually, almost everything on this planet. That was his starting point.

But how to understand how the nature of human culture and nature at large fit together? That was always on his mind during his Moroccan adventures.

CJ? The protagonist writing his autobiography in Tangier Gardens, arcane literary fiction adventure. Buy it on Amazon via this link: https://amzn.to/3HLrtyv