75. Janet Fish, painter

A friend of mine on FB commented this morning, "Sometimes I find out about artists because they die. This is Janet Fish"—and a link to an LA Times obituary. Because I don't get the LAT, I went to the NY Times, and found their obit. And fell in love with this artist who painted still-lifes, and who became known for the exquisite way she captured light on glass. 

Fish was born in Boston in 1938, but lived from age ten in Bermuda, where she was surrounded by art and artists (her grandfather, who had a studio on the island, was Impressionist painter Clark Voorhees, her father was an art history professor, her mother was a potter and sculptor). After studying painting at Yale, Fish came to New York City in the 1960s when Abstract Expressionism was still going strong, but she wasn't interested in pursuing that direction—or the ensuing styles, Minimalism and Pop Art. Instead she headed into realism, painting the light as it moved over objects she arranged on a table near her window. As art historian Linda Nochlin put it in her 1988 book Women, Art, and Power, “She confers an unprecedented dignity upon the grouped jelly jars or wine bottles that she renders with such deference. The glassy fruit- or liquid-filled volumes confront us with the hypnotic solemnity of the processional mosaics at Ravenna, and a similar, faceted, surface sparkle.”

I tend to think of still lifes as being small, intimate, but Fish worked large. She was interested not so much in the "still life" itself, as in what it represented, energetically, connectively.  As she put it, "I see light as energy, and energy is always moving through us. I don’t see things as being separated—I don’t paint the objects, I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting."

Fish suffered a brain hemorrhage over ten years ago, which forced her to quit painting. She died on January 1, from another brain hemorrhage, at age 87. 

Here are just a few examples of her beautiful work. She was prolific. 

Bird's Nest/Apple Blossoms, 2004

Smucker's Jelly, 1973

Box of Four Red Applies, 1970

Yellow Glass Bowl with Tangerines, 2007

Fruit Juice Glasses, 2005

Five Tall Glasses, Afternoon, 1975

7 Glasses, 13 Pears, 2003

Painted Glasses, 1974

Basket of Shells, 2008

Mirror and Shell, 1981

Preserved Peaches, 1976

Bag of Tangerines, 2000

Here is a 2019 interview with Fish by a filmmaker interested in SOHO, the part of New York City where she once worked. 

Book Report: Just Mercy

25. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) (12/31/25)

Thanks to my alphabet project, I finally picked up this book. It's eye-opening, about the criminal justice system in this country, by the man who, in 1989, founded the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to help individuals unjustly sentenced to death row. Their work spread to helping children sentenced to life in adult prisons and many other concerns. Several Supreme Court cases have been decided on EJI lawyers' testimony.

This book details one case in particular, that of Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death based on false evidence extracted by corrupt officials in Alabama. The plain fact of the matter was clear—Walter was miles away from the incident he was later arrested for, the murder of a young woman in a dry cleaners, and he had dozens of corroborating witnesses. But he was Black, and the prosecutors needed a perp. In telling his story, Stevenson outlines the arbitrariness and intractability of the US justice system, especially in Southern states where Jim Crow is still very much alive and well. 

Interspersed are many other stories, of individuals arrested for crimes and dealt unjust punishments. Stevenson gets to know these people individually and makes them all real to us readers. Some of them—including Walter McMillian—he succeeded in getting released from prison. Others, at the end of the book, are still awaiting clemency. The stories he details take place over the course of years, in some cases decades. 

In 2020 this book was made into a highly rated film, Just Mercy. Here is the trailer. 

The Equal Justice Initiative is still going strong. They explain their project(s) better than I can. The page on criminal justice reform is worth a look, if you're interested. 

Another feature of the site is a Racial Justice Calendar, which provides a day-by-day calendar of significant events in our country's racial/racist history. Today, December 31, 118 years ago, for example, in a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Judge Thomas Norwood, a former U.S. senator, advocated the death penalty for Black people in interracial relationships. 

The "Our Work" tab for EJI provides these links:

There is no end of work to be done. 

74. This Year's Books

This year I had no goal of a specific number of books to read, as I have had in some years past. Just... to read. So here's my 2025 list, twenty-five in all. And as so often, many of the books I tackled were thrillers/mysteries. I do like a good story. Those are marked by an asterisk.

(I'm still working on the last book, but I'm sure I'll have it done by Thursday. I've got less than 100 pages to go, plus it's riveting. And that's saying something, since it's nonfiction.)

2/23 Philip Roth, The Plot against America
2/23 Martin Walker, The Patriarch*
3/18 Raynor Winn, The Salt Path
4/3 Kate Atkinson, Case Histories*
4/16 Mick Herron, Dead Lions*
4/23 Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief
4/28 Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days
4/30 Mark Salzman, The Man in the Empty Boat
5/6 Percival Everett, James (audio mostly)
5/30 Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife
6/4 Elizabeth O’Connor, Whale Fall
6/19 Mick Herron, Real Tigers*
6/24 Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
7/29 Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
8/3 John Kenney, I See You’ve Called in Dead
8/11 Jess Walter, So Far Gone
8/24 William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake*
8/30 S. A Cosby, King of Ashes*
10/18 Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook*
10/21 William Kent Krueger, Boundary Waters*
11/11 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
12/3 Mick Herron,  Spook Street*
12/9 Andrea Lewis, What My Last Man Did
12/25 Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls
soon Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Sixteen by men, only nine by women—I'll change that up next year. Nine thrillers/mysteries. I probably won't change that up. April was a winning month, closely followed by August and December. Maybe next year I'll try for at least one book a month, but maybe it doesn't matter. At all.

I have started back on my alphabetical challenge, with the last couple of books here—I and J. I've already got the next book sussed, but it's in German, so next year might be even fewer titles. We'll see. It's not a contest. I read for the pleasure of inhabiting other worlds, to learn something, to expand my awareness and my empathy too. Sometimes I read to practice one of my languages. Or simply to be engrossed, entranced, entertained. There are so many reasons to cuddle up with a book.

P.S. I found a different K book, in English, so the pace can stay steadily directed forward. But I am going to schedule a daily fifteen minutes, half hour, for the German K book as well. Slowly by slowly I will get it done.

Book Report: Impossible Owls

24. Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls: Essays (2018) (12/25/25)

I have no recollection of where I heard about this book, but I'm glad I did. A collection of eight essays, it ranges far and wide and is full of sparkling writing. The subject matter covers the 2013 Iditarod, sumo wrestling and the writer Yukio Mishima, Area 51, the Russian animator Yuri Norstein (whom I devoted a post to last week, I so enjoyed that essay), man-eating tigers in India, "science fiction in small towns" (in particular, Phillips's interesting takes on Wrath of the Titans, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The X-Files as reflections of American society), Queen Elizabeth II and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, and finally, the checkered story of a woman, Lydie Marland, from the small town Phillips grew up in, Ponca City, Oklahoma. 

The "impossible owls" of the title aren't addressed specifically, but in almost every essay owls make a brief appearance. For example, here, in describing the sumo phenom, Mongolian-born Hakuhō Shō, it is in contrast to Gagamaru, 

the Georgian wrestler who is currently [2014] the largest man in top-division sumo—440 pounds and a little over six feet tall—[and] looks like a canyon seen from the air, all crevasses and folds. Hakuho, by contrast, is a single large stone, an owl quickly sketched by Miyazaki. His face is vague. Once in a while he will glance to one side with what looks like critical intelligence. Then he blurs again.

In the Area 51 essay, "The Lost Highway," Phillips describes meeting "a man who said owls forecast his destiny." This man, Mike, speaks freely of paranormal events he has experienced, or given thought to. "There's a beauty to his stories," Phillips writes,

most of which are about how, when something truly inexplicable happens, owls tend to turn up around the edges of the event. You'll see a dozen of them on a telephone wire, and then, around the next corner, the spacecraft. Owls appear with unnerving frequency in what those who believe they've been abducted call screen memories, artificial recollections implanted by aliens to mask what really took place. Mike's written a book, collecting accounts of owls in paranormal events. He thinks they might be psychic projections of extraterrestrial beings. As in cloaks that aliens wear to hide from us. The more real an owl appears, perhaps, the less likely it is to be what it seems. Perhaps many of the things that seem most vividly real to us seem so because they overlap a world of dreams. Mike described lying in the woods, looking up, feeling the silent passage of owls' wings.

In "Man-Eaters," Phillips hears a fish owl, its call sounding 

nothing like the who, who of the owls I was familiar with. It was a low moan, mmmmm, faint but insistent, the sound of a person stunned with pain. Very hard to spot in this light, Mr. Sharma [his guide] said. . . .
     Then I saw it. It was perched on a fallen tree limb a short way ahead. It was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. Its body was brown, with a white outline, and the feathers of its head were white. It was beautiful because of its marvelous tail, which fanned out behind it, and because of the angle of its head, which somehow implied a gentleness and thoughtfulness quite different from what most owls' heads express. I stared. Just when I was about to point it out to Mr. Sharma, we drew a little closer, and I saw that the owl was only a broken branch extending from the fallen limb.

When he describes the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, which he saw as a kid, he said he loved 

in particular the golden owl, Bubo; years later, when I read "Sailing to Byzantium" for the first time, and got to the part where Yeats asks to leave his mortal body and be refashioned as a golden bird, Bubo was what I pictured him becoming.

An owl—a real one (or maybe just an imagined one)—shows up as well in Phillips's recounting of The X-Files at the very end of "In the Dark: Science Fiction in Small Towns." A "monstrous owl" makes a cameo appearance in the "Her Castles" section of "Once and Future Queen," about ERII. And finally we have a pair of stone owls, their eyes containing "tiny red lights," on the staircase landing of the Marland mansion in Ponca City. (I'm sure there was a mention of owls in the Iditarod piece, but I hadn't started dog-earing yet, and the mention was so brief that I can't locate it by skimming.)

In any case, there you have a sample of Phillips's excellent writing and whatever explication we're going to get about the impossibility of owls. 

This is his only book, though he has also hosted two podcasts, Truthless, about "the lies people tell," and 22 Goals, about the history of the World Cup. He has also written a number of book reviews for the Poetry Foundation. 

Well, I'm glad he collected his essays into this book. I learned a lot.

73. Afternoon walk

I took myself out for a walk this afternoon, before rain sets in. My old habit was to turn left from my house, walk through the local park with its children's playground, basketball court, baseball field, and dog park, and across the highway to the Frog Pond Wetland Reserve, a 17-acre oasis with an encircling path, whereupon I would complete several circuits while listening to podcasts. Here are a couple of photos; it's a beautiful spot, a wonderful place to indulge in nature and only a five-minute walk from home.

But as I say, I used to do that. For the past year-plus, the Frog Pond has been off-limits as a bike path is constructed that, upon completion, will allow users to walk or cycle under the busy highway—a definite improvement. 

So I have had to find other walking options. Today's took me out of the house to the right, past a plant nursery (that is in the process of shutting down—I wonder what will come in in its place), and along the constantly changing other half of the bike path—the most recent progress being pavement (last week) and tall black lightposts (the last couple of days). I then pass the Safeway supermarket (parking lot jam-packed today, two days before Christmas), cross the busy thoroughfare that is Fremont Boulevard, and descend some railroad-tie stairs—where homeless people often hang out, but not today—to Laguna Grande Regional Park. Sometimes I just walk around the laguna, but today I continued on across also-busy Del Monte Boulevard to another bike path that takes me up on the dunes with lovely views of Monterey Bay. From there it's back to Laguna Grande and home. It's about 4 miles in all. 

Today I took some photos, ranging from view shots to close-ups of patterns that I found interesting. Here they are. Click on them to see them larger. 

Laguna Grande. As I took this photo a weathered man on
a bike pulled up. He commented on how lovely the hotel was,
reflected in the water. I pointed out the ducks, which he admired.
His name was Mike. 

Beat-up reflectors on the bike ramp

Two people and their dog—and Santa Cruz across the water

Peeling paint retaining wall

The sandy bike path and a big sky. (This is approximately
where the two people and their dog were when I snapped them.)

A remnant of what was next to a tennis court; I wonder if the
construction workers are preserving it as something of a joke.
Will it survive the finished project? Will the tennis court return? 

Santa has been hiding under these fake flowers for a very
long time, by the looks of it...

I enjoy using my camera to see what I can see. It reminds me what a beautiful place I live in. I do need to find some more walking options, though. The Frog Pond will be closed off for another year. 

72. Elise Wagner, encaustic artist

In October 2024 I did a workshop with the Astoria, Oregon, artist Elise Wagner in encaustic (i.e. wax-based) art. I do not think of myself as an artist, and that workshop definitely convinced me that I will never be an encaustic artist. It's hard! But the results are beautiful, if you know what you're doing. Here are some of Elise's works. 

Here, Elise talks about her process.

I enjoyed (truly!) my weekend feeling utterly (truly!) incompetent. I also enjoyed being surrounded by artists—my two fellow students are bona fide artists. I am glad that people out there are continuing to make work that opens our eyes to the beauty and meaning of it all.

71. Yuri Norstein, animator

You know how sometimes you discover something so wonderful, you wonder how or why it's been withheld from your consciousness, your understanding of the world, for so long? So many fabulous people, activities, creations, etc. etc. out there, of course you can't bump into them all, or even a tiny fraction of them. But/and, oh how lovely to have your world thus enlarged at least every so often.

That happened to me today as I read an essay in the book I'm currently tackling, Brian Phillips's Impossible Owls (the title alone enlarges my world), which I will report on anon. The essay in question is titled "The Little Gray Wolf Will Come," and it concerns a Russian animator named Yuri Norstein, considered by some to be the greatest animator in the world. His output is relatively small, just a handful of short films. Phillips became interested in him when he encountered a reference to a project Norstein had been working on, about the great Gogol short story "The Overcoat," for thirty-seven years. And that was as of 2013. 

I just want to keep him alive in my consciousness, so I'll post a few videos and links. 

First, what he engages in here is astonishing cut-out animation, which he accomplishes together with his wife, Francheska Yarbusova. It is briefly described in this introduction to his corpus:

Here is his utterly charming 1975 film Hedgehog in the Fog (Ёжик в тумане). (In addition to the visuals, I love listening to the Russian narration.) It's quite possible that the first word I ever learned in Russian—besides da, nyet, dosvidanya, and (thank you, Clockwork Orange) kharasho—was yozhik, or hedgehog. That from David, who took Russian in high school, and they'd throw a little stuffed hedgehog around the room to tag the next one up to read or respond to the assignment. And who doesn't love a yozhik?

Then, Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок) from 1979, about "the way memory is conjured up." (The version here is fairly low-res, but it has English subtitles. For a high-res rendering, go here.)

A few years ago, the Atrocity Guide posted a short film about Norstein and Yarbusova's "Overcoat" project (Шинель), titled The Animators Who've Spent Forty Years on a Single Film:

And here are 5 minutes of clips from the project. As one commentator notes, it takes 200 hours to animate 12 seconds. So far, they've finished about 25 minutes of what might end up being an hour-long project. That is dedication. Obsession. Genius or madness, or both.

You can read an interview with Norstein from 2020. In 2021 the Moscow Times commemorated his 80th birthday. And here is a 2005 article from the Washington Post about The Overcoat. He was also featured in a 2005 book by Clare Kitson, former head of animation at BBC 4.

I've just now stumbled on this creator. But from the bits I've seen so far, I would have to agree that Yuri Norstein is one hell of an animator. And he seems to have a beautiful heart and soul as well.